Critical Lives Che Guevara

Che Guevara is a legend. The son of Argentine intellectuals, he became first a physician, then a brilliant tactician who helped lead the revolution in Cuba, then an enduring, almost mythical icon of revolutionary struggles all over the world. Though he was killed more than 30 years ago, his name and image remain uniquely compelling and mysterious. What makes him so fascinating? What actions and accomplishments set him apart from his contemporaries and continue to capture our imagination today? In this concise, informative biography you’ll explore: • Guevara's boyhood, background, and development into a radical. • The profound impact a medical condition had on him throughout his life. • His role in the Cuban Revolution and later liberation movements in Latin America and Africa. • The mystery surrounding his death in Bolivia in 1967. The Critical Lives series takes a biographical look at pivotal, fascinating people and a critical look at the work and accomplishments that, rightly or wrongly, made them unique, influential, and enduring. Discover the events that shaped their lives and how they came to shape our world.

Che Guevara: Cuban revolutionary, doctor, communist, author, rebel, hero, villain - and according to Jean Paul Satre the most complete human being of his age. He was a fascinating character whose life is explored in this enlightening book.

The controversial life and career of Ernesto Ché Guevara (1928-1967) has earned the revolutionary leader admirers and detractors across the world. In his critical biography, Daniel James penetrates the myths that have grown up around Guevara since his death. The biography carefully analyzes the Cold War situations in which Guevara lived and fought, and which turned the young medical student into a guerilla and political theoretician. Ché Guevara: A Biography includes interviews with Guevara's first wife, and extensive information on the revolutionary's early years and family life lacking in other biographies. James also discusses Guevara's actions in Cuba as a leader in the rebel army of Fidel Castro, covering in detail Guevara's military victories, his post-war executions of anti-Castro prisoners, and his criticism of Soviet Communism. This unique and unsparing portrait of Guevara includes and an in-depth examination of his last guerilla campaign in Bolivia.

An accessible and well-researched biography that explores the life and ideas of an iconic revolutionary. “At Last, at last, a biography of Che Guevara for grown-ups! Nick Caistor, well-known for years as a commentator on Latin America for the BBC, has produced a study of a man who is all too often treated either as a plaster saint incapable of doing wrong or as some devil from the deepest pit of Marxism-Leninism. Caistor portrays him with sympathy and elegance as what he was, a human being with doubts and weaknesses, which he combined with a devotion to the world’s poor.” —Hugh O’Shaughnessy, journalist Argentine by birth, Ernesto “Che” Guevara came to embody the spirit of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro. Guevara spent two years fighting in the sierras of Cuba, and after the revolutionaries’ victory became one of the leading members of the government as well as one of Castro’s closest and most controversial associates. Also an important writer, Guevara constantly developed ideas about how to spread anti-imperialist revolution throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Guevara made a huge contribution to theories of socialism, predicting the emergence of a “new man” who would represent what for him were humanist values of the Cuban revolution. His later years took him to Africa, in search of another guerilla war, and finally to a tragic end in the mountains of Bolivia. Che Guevara was someone who showed few contradictions between his life and his writing, and his example continues to win admirers among new generations anxious to explore ways of changing their world.

Making use of unprecedented access to Guevara's personal archives, his guerrilla cohorts, and Cuban government archives, an exhaustive biography traces the life of the Latin American communist revolutionary.

By the time he was killed in the jungles of Bolivia, where his body was displayed like a deposed Christ, Ernesto "Che" Guevara had become a synonym for revolution everywhere from Cuba to the barricades of Paris. This extraordinary biography peels aside the veil of the Guevara legend to reveal the charismatic, restless man behind it. Drawing on archival materials from three continents and on interviews with Guevara's family and associates, Castaneda follows Che from his childhood in the Argentine middle class through the years of pilgrimage that turned him into a committed revolutionary. He examines Guevara's complex relationship with Fidel Castro, and analyzes the flaws of character that compelled him to leave Cuba and expend his energies, and ultimately his life, in quixotic adventures in the Congo and Bolivia. A masterpiece of scholarship, Companero is the definitive portrait of a figure who continues to fascinate and inspire the world over.

Viva la revolución! Find out how Che Guevara--a doctor turned communist leader and much more than a face on a T-shirt--ended up paying the ultimate price for his cause. His very image has become associated with a spirit of rebellion, but Ernesto Guevara--known around the world simply as Che--didn't dream of becoming a revolutionary. Author Ellen Labrecque takes readers on a journey through Che's life starting with his childhood in Argentina, to his travels through South and Central America as a young physician, and ending with his final years as a key player in the Cuban revolution. His legacy--as the author of The Motorcycle Diaries, a champion of the poor, and a force for change in Cuba--is both personal and political.

Argentine by birth, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara came to embody the spirit of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro. Guevara spent two years fighting in the sierras of Cuba, and after the revolutionaries' victory became one of the most important members of the government as well as one of Castro's closest and most controversial associates. Also an important writer, Guevara constantly put forward ideas about how to spread anti-imperialist revolution throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. He made a huge contribution to theories about how a socialist society should lead to the emergence of a 'new man' who represented what for him were the humanist values of the Cuban revolution. His later years took him to Africa, in search of another guerrilla war, and finally to a tragic end in the mountains of Bolivia.Che Guevara was someone who showed few contradictions between his life and his writing, and his example continues to win admirers among new generations anxious to explore ways of changing their world. In this short, accessible biography Nick Caistor explores the life and ideas of an iconic revolutionary.