Customer Reviews

Guevara Also Known As Che

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the US, Paco Taibo II is better known within the mystery readers' crowd for his accomplished police stories with a touch of irony and a shrewd writing style. For this reason with certain apprehension I started reading this biography. In fact it was the first complete and serious Che's bio I have ever read. Later I grabbed Jon Lee Anderson's one... Of all Che's bios Paco's is the most enchanting one. It may lack the huge documention of Anderson's book, but it compensates it with an amazing style. Paco cannot divorce his own admiration of Che from his subject, but, hey, that is exactly why this book becomes so much enjoyable. I still recall grabbing the book (700 hundred pages!) one morning and going that same night to bed with the book in my hands! I couldn't stop reading it! Che's story is reflected under the light of an amazing storyteller. The episodes of Che's story are exquisitely threaded together in a masterful way. His life becomes flesh and blood in Paco's hands. The icon, the symbol of rebellion and struggle for social justice turns a man, an incredible, passionate and admirable human being throughout the book. The end cannot be better: it is ghostly but hopeful with a lot of energy and sadness and beauty: a song to Latin American history of struggle.

I was walking around wearing one of those 'Che' T-shirts and a guy asked me some questions about him. I felt pretty stupid not knowing more than I did. So I started reading about Che. That was 3 years ago.
I have read his diaries, speeches, FBI files, everything I could find....THIS was the BEST.
The author is truly a Che fan, but he still points out mistakes Che made, but the best thing is he provides everything in its context. He builds the background of where Che came from, what his life was. The reader FEELS 50's 60's Latin America so you can really emphasize with the actions and emotions of the integral characters.
Sum it up, even though it was a factual biography I still was totally engrossed reading 500 some pages in about 3 days, and still re-reading it.
A pleasure.

Of two most recent books on the life and death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, this is the most personal and personable. Paco Taibo's translated writing touches the reader with the untouchable moments of Che's life, leaving behind the hype, the political interventions and propositions, and the devious subterfuge of reading into or out of events the vision of Che as a misguided revolutionary. Taibo tells us about a naive man who only near the end came to the beginnings of understanding how revolutions cannot be institutionalized. However, this excellent book is one star shy of perfect because of numerous typos and misspellings as well as horrible mix-ups of words and phrases in the middle of what would have been otherwise a seamless joy to read. Buy the book and read it, but have a blue pencil in hand so that, once you find the butchery of the text, you can excise it in true revolutionary fashion, so that others who come to read later will not have to suffer the confusion of trying to understand a very understandable man. Para que el Che viva, lo podremos creer.

As other reviewers have said, this is the best of the Che biographies. Paco Taibo does the research and tells the story in a way that brings life to a myth as few other biographers in any era have been able to do. This is Ernesto Guevara as he lived and died, and you can understand how he became "El Che" the icon of the "Unredeemed America", and what drove him inexorably towards the bullet that ended his life in the dilapidated schoolhouse at La Higuera. For anyone who has seen "The Motorcycle Diaries", this book is necessary reading. I bought it five years ago and read pretty much the whole thing in a couple days. Since then, I will often grab this book and start reading at some random point, and not put it down for an hour or so. As mentioned by someone before, once you start turning the pages it is difficult to stop. The reason for this is twofold. First, the life portrayed here was an epic journey and second, Taibo is a not only a storyteller par excellence, but has a keen sense of the history of the times and is able to inject his own commentary to illuminate many of the seminal events during the course of Che's life. He is also relating to Che from a Latin American perspective, distinctly different from what North American readers may be used to. For instance, his Mexican roots are in evidence by his comparison of the legendary Mexican comedic actor Cantinflas to Che's own occasional sense of the absurdity of life. It is these touches that also help set this biography apart from the others on Che. We see another side of the legend.

The biography starts with Che's family in Argentina, and their somewhat bohemian background. We learn how the young Ernesto suffered greatly from asthma, an affliction that would shape his stoic character all his life. We also learn that at an early age he followed the Spanish Civil War and the battles of the Second World War, and not only how the motorcycle trip with Alberto Granado helped form his outlook, but how he was forced to flee for his life from Guatemala as the elected government of Arbenz was violently toppled by Uncle Sam. This was the event that caused Che to pick up a rifle and give up on democracy as a means to effect change in Latin America, as well as made him willing to be incinerated in an atomic holocaust rather than surrender to a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

The history of the Cuban Revolution and Che's work for Fidel's government is fascinating reading, but perhaps the most impressive parts of the book were the last few chapters detailing the ill-fated Congo and Bolivian expeditions. The Bolivian campaign reads like a funeral dirge, but even here we see the determination and self-effacing humor of the protaganist shining through til the end. The last chapter is an inspiring summation of a life lived in the most uncompromising manner, and is probably the best eulogy written for that life. One senses the author's personal attachment to the subject, which by this time has firmly become the reader's as well.

The comment by another reviewer about the poor editing was true, as there are many typos and grammatical errors in the English edition I have. I am hoping this was or could be cleaned up in later printings so as not to detract from what is a classic text. Anyone interested in the life of Guevara will find this not only required reading, but a truly superlative biography by any standard.

I read this more because I am a fan of Taibo than because of Che, but I have read other biographies of Che and this is clearly the best I've seen - one of the best biographies I have read, in fact. He makes you feel as though you knew him yourself.

This edition, at least, misses getting a five-star rating from me, however, due to the perfectly atrocious editing! There are literally hundreds of typos, misspellings, poorly phrased sentences, etc. It is very distracting.

This book is a recount or recollection of data based on events related to the life of Ernesto Guevara known as "El Che". In some sense, the book contains a lack of analysis and interpretation of the information, an aspect Jorge Castaneda (another Che's biographer) does better. In my opinion, the best chapters are the last ones where the author, using a more sensitive (and closer) approach towards his subject, narrates the events sorrounding his death at the jungles of Bolivia. I have to confess that I felt very moved.

Guevara is actually the last in a long list of tragic figures of the Latin-American tradition: Atahualpa, Tupac Amaru, Sandino, Jose Marti...If you may find him anachronistic, just think about General Patton crossing the harsh European winter with the Third Army.

This book should be read at a counterpoint with Castaneda's and Anderson's ones and a close observation of the chapters which serve as a kind of epilogue that converts the book in a kind of John Le Carre novel should be noticed. Because maybe the information that is not there becomes more important; the question that remains unanswered is who to blame for the terrible death Che suffered in Bolivia? He, himself as it have been said because he was a romantic? Fidel Castro alone as the easy legend turned into gossip says? or a whole chain of political intrigue related to the last years of the Cold War? So researchers, historians, writers and scholars are invited: the story of Che's life (and death) is not a closed chapter.

A book I strongly recommend as a last advice and new beginning is Jorge Ricardo Masetti's "El furor y el delirio", Barcelona, Tusquets (an English version is available) by the son of Argentine journalist of the same name and a friend of Che.

I would recomend this book to anyone,however, I thought Anderson went into much greater detail regarding Che's travels throughout Latin america and especially, his discriptions of the once dominating United Fruit Company. I really enjoyed this authors discriptions of the autrocites commited by Batista and his sectet police, he was a brutal american, puppet dictator. How can any american actually belive that america has allways stook for freadom around the world.

I took the 1997 first edition of this book on a recent trip to Cuba, and have just now finished it. I hope the current paperback edition is better. The edition I read contained more typos and translation errors than any book I've ever read -- my estimate is at least 300 in number. A further deficiency in this book is the lack of maps, which makes following Che's Cuban campaign extremely confusing, and I never fully understood the campaign until I saw a map of it in Havana's Museum of the Revolution.

The book is basically a chronological review of Che's life and at 600 pages it's an exhaustive review. Its unique feature is that all words attributed to Che are in bold print. There are a number of photographs, but the qualtiy of reproduction is poor.

Despite these deficiencies, the book was a real page-turner and I recommend it for anyone who wants to understand one of the most remarkable men of the 20th Century. Possibly, you will find as I did, that in this case the man is actually bigger than the myth.

This book is a very in-depth biography of Che Guevara. It's well researched and very informative. While it is easy to tell in places that Taibo is a fan of Che Guevara, he doesn't let bias cloud his account of Che's life completely. Some negative things are included in the story,too. The book covers Che's whole life, starting with his childhood and spanning all the way until his death. All of the author's source materials are listed and meticulously noted. The book, though obviously written from a very loving perspective, still maintains a fairly scholarly feel throughout. There's lots of detailed history. You can tell that the author set out to write a reasonably comprehensive and very factual telling of Che's life.

All of the detail,though, makes for a fairly slow read and a bit of text book feel. If you're looking for light reading, this is not the book for you. If you're seriously studying Guevara, the book is a great book to add to your research list. In fact, it's a great detailed but sweeping overview to start with. If it weren't for the obviously pro-Che slant, it wouldn't be a bad choice if you were only planning on reading one book on Guevara. But since it's not a completely unbiased account, I recommend if you want to fully understand Guevara, that you read some other accounts as well.

Taibo II has a beautiful writing style and is extremely knowledgeable on Che's life. His book reads with more credence, he interviewed many people who had various encounters with Che from a regular soldier, to a campensino, and his family. He gives a very interesting look at Che, and shows the different sides of him from a commander who shot a soldier to a man who gave a splint to a bird with a hurt leg.
It also comes with a treasure trove of pictures of Che, which is always exciting in a serious book.