Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara

Excellent - Literary Review Castañeda unearths a mine of curious details... Compañero is superbly researched and commendably sceptical - Sunday Times Drawing on archives in Argentina, Mexico, Cuba and Russia and interviewing Che Guevara's associates and family, Jorge Castañeda has rescued Che from the mists of hippie mythology, Cuban hagiography and historical gloss. Castañeda provides a spellbinding account of Castro's campaign and defeat of Batista and Che's emergence as an invaluable strategist and a leader respected for his egalitarian decency and honesty with his troops. This is both a reassessment of Che's career and an enlightened portrait of the man: his mother, his marriages, his narcissism, his wilful determination, his rage. Above all he emerges as an idealist of unique historical timing, who most closely embodied the deeper meaning of the 1968 student uprising, whose last call for a modern Utopia still resonates at the close a a century bereft of Utopias.