The Che shown here seems not just a man of history, but somebody it would have been great to know.
A welcome trove of fresh biographical material about a revolutionary who cast a gargantuan shadow over the 20th century.
First published in Britain in 2007, Toledo’s translation is culled from two memoirs written by Guevara’s adoring father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch. Although rife with hagiography, the volume still paints a vivid portrait of the Argentine medical student who helped topple the Batista regime in Cuba. The first half is mostly in the voice of Guevara Lynch, who died in 1987, and is somewhat hit and miss. His descriptions of the family’s tense monitoring from afar of Che’s surprising (to them) involvement in the Cuban Revolution are dramatic. But that section and a lengthy account of Che’s childhood in Argentina are hindered by chest-swelling paternal pride and frequently flat prose. The real gold comes in Che’s voice, heard in an intelligently edited series of journal entries and letters that comprise the bulk of the book. Discovered five years after his death in the basement of the Buenos Aires apartment building where his family lived, the journal entries describe his solo 1950 motorcycle trip through northern Argentina; they make a colorful travelogue and a nice complement to the better-known account of his 1952 odyssey across South America. Che’s correspondence with his extended family brings him even more alive. Written as he traveled north to Central America, the letters create a strong picture of his powerfully restless intellect, casually warm humor and enduring wanderlust. Che’s interests were impressively wide-ranging, from archaeology to allergy research, and his correspondence demonstrates a deep commitment to each of them. The letters’ joshing tone doesn’t obscure his growing commitment to revolution, particularly after personally witnessing the brutal U.S.-sponsored coup in Guatemala.
The Che shown here seems not just a man of history, but somebody it would have been great to know.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39044-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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