Ken's Reviews > The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

To be up front here at the front of this review, I didn't know Che Guevara was a writer. According to the bio info, not only travel journal writing, which he developed here the year after his peregrinations throughout South America, but short stories, even.

I did know he had a medical background, however. Dr. Che, Renaissance Man. And, to his eventual and early demise, Angry Young Man who predicted (incorrectly assuming men preferred principles and justice over profit and greed) the end of capitalism was nigh.

Yup. Just like the Holy Rollers who come out of the woodwork every now and again to say the END is nigh. Judgment Day. When the Lord settles some old scores, Old Testament-like.

But where was I? Ah, yes. Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and so on and so forth. Che with his medical pal, starting first on an old motorcycle at age 23, and then bumming rides on truck flatbeds, rough-hewn rafts, etc.

Che who becomes a master at begging for food without seeming to beg for food. Che who suffers from serious asthma attacks without the proper medication for them. Che who, as you'd expect from any journal, comes across as oh-so-human and oh-so-sympathetic that you, too, would be pissed about CIA-backed goons executing him some 15 years later (Che probably being a better Renaissance man than soldier schooled in evasive maneuvers).

A yeoman outing, it is, more interesting because of the man than his writing ability, which is... yeoman. Meaning: this is of historical importance, in its way, and it certainly humanizes the icon who is now best known for his trademark face and beret, now available to the proletariat as a T-shirt or poster (via the capitalism he so detested) by clicking to "CART" at an online merchant near you. Or your computer, maybe.