Ernesto Guevara

In a letter to his mother in 1954, a young Ernesto Guevara wrote, ''The Americas will be the theater of my adventures in a way that is much more significant than I would have believed.'' In The Awakening of Latin America we have the story of those adventures, charting Che''s evolution from an impressionable young medical student to the ''heroic guerrilla,'' assassinated in cold blood in Bolivia. Spanning seventeen years, this anthology draws on from his family''s personal archives and offers the best of Che''s writing: examples of his journalism, essays, speeches, letters, and even poems. As Che documents his early travels through Latin America, his involvement in the Guatemalan and Cuban revolutions, and his rise to international prominence under Fidel Castro, we see how his fervent commitment to social justice shaped and was shaped by the continent he called home.

Before Ernesto Che Guevara became ''Che,'' before he traveled Latin America, before he joined Fidel in Cuba, he was a medical school student. In 1956 he wrote to his mother before leaving to go and join the guerilla expedition to Cuba: ''My path seems to be slowly but surely diverging from that of clinical medicine, but not so far that I have lost my nostalgia for hospitals. What I told you about the professorship in physiology was a lie, but not a big one. It was a lie because I never planned to accept it, but the offer was real and there was a strong possibility that they were going to give it to me, as I had an interview and everything. Anyway, that''s all history. Saint Carlos Karl Marx has made a new recruit.'' He had started a book on the role of the doctor in Latin America, a work he fully intended to continue writing. It remained incomplete at the time of his death in Bolivia at the age of thirty-nine, just eleven years later.

An extraordinary selection of the letters of Che Guevara 'Always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world' Che Guevara was an inveterate letter writer and diarist throughout his short but extraordinary life. This selection of his letters begins with his youthful motorcycle travels around Latin America as a wide-eyed medical student, and goes on to cover the Cuban Revolutionary War - including his letter to Castro after its success - his subsequent role as a government leader, travels to the Congo and finally Bolivia at the end of his life. Together they map the emergence of a dedicated revolutionary, but also reveal him as a master narrator: honest and insightful, with a razor-sharp wit, an iron will and, in his intimate writings to his family, a great capacity to express affection for those closest to him.

'A Latin American James Dean or Jack Kerouac' Washington Post 'It's true; Marxists just wanna have fun... a revolutionary bestseller' Guardian At the age of twenty-three, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set out from their native Argentina to explore their continent, with only a single 1939 Norton motorcycle to carry them, nicknamed La Poderosa ('the powerful one'). They travelled not to visit the usual tourist attractions, but to meet ordinary people and understand Latin American life. In amidst the tales of youthful adventures - of women, wine, thrilling escapes and the power of friendship - the young Che also learns first-hand about poverty, philosophy and philosophy and forms himself into the man who would become the world's most famous and admired revolutionary and freedom fighter. 'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time