Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara by His Father

Former journalist and interpreter De Toledo translates for the first time into English the loving memoirs (from 1981 and 1987) of Che Guevara's father. Guevara Lynch chronicles his son's upbringing in their upper-middle-class, politically active family and draws on anecdote to illustrate the boy's tenacity (e.g., Che struggled with asthma all his life). Many of Che's early years were spent in rural Argentina, where, Guevara Lynch explains, he came to love the exploited agrarian workers he would one day fight for, and where he developed a sense for navigating wilderness similar to the terrain he would one day traverse as a guerrilla fighter. The notebooks and letters Che sent home while touring South America as a worker and medical student-including those he wrote while preparing to invade Cuba with Fidel Castro-evoke a fervent mind almost as fond of family jokes and the study of allergies as he was of revolution.