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Motorcycles Book Store > Motorcycles books beginning with C
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Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend |
Author: Patrick Symmes
Published: 2000-02-15 |
List price: $14.00
Our price: $11.90
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As of: July 29th, 2010 11:19:15 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Excellent
Put me right there........back with Che'
Darn good read!!!!!!!!!
Cannot get enough of this motorcycle travel stuff.....
This guy was different however...
he did not sugar coat the filth and the unpleasantness of the journey.....
Two Good Yarns in One
I purchased and read this book because of my love of the South American continent, the people who live there and travel. Living Dreams 1 Van, 3 Years, 2 Parents, 6 Kids, 15 Countries and Becoming a Functional Family Symmes writes eloquently as he tells the story of his own motorcycle journey while retracing and retelling Che Gueveras'. The reason for taking on the task appears to be, simply a need to search out and understand more about the icon. This book certainly gave me a broader perspective. Symmes own experience was well worth the read, yet he intertwined it with historical facts, present day observations and the travels that transformed Ernesto's thought processes and turned him into Che. I would have liked to know more of how this journey effected the author himself, but since Symmes is a reporter first, the story is written without much personal input. A good read for anyone contemplating a motorcycle adventure in South America.
 on the road with Che and Symmes
This was the second read after several years. Still enjoyable, I think mostly to people who have ever wondered "Who was this Che person?" in the first place. As I have always found the Cuban revolution interesting, I was curious about Che Guevera. Patrick Symmes provides us with a lot of background on the subject, interwoven with a motorcycle trip of his own, tracing Che's pre-revolutionary, self-seeking trip through South America.
Yes, Symmes must have had a lot of time on his hands and loved journalism as an art to attempt this journey, but I know just enough about South America to find his adventures fascinating. It's kind of like a real long article in Newsweek, but a good one.
 More about the travel than Che
"Chasing Che" as you can read from the book description is a story of the authors travels through South America following the same route that Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado took in 1952. The book is more about his encounters with locals as well as the hardships faced on riding a motorcycle through rural areas, and how they have changed since Che and Granado fist traveled through them. He describes these towns and their people as curious about the "outside world" yet at the same time as being invaded by our own culture. An example of this is how the kids in Argentina have never seen a BMW motorcycle yet are all wearing "NO FEAR" shirts. Also, in the mountains of Peru or Bolivia there is a parade with dancing reenactments of the Incans fighting the Spaniards while the dancers are wearing Adidas shoes. Throughout his journey he tries to meet people that Che encountered and visit the same places that had left impressions on Che and Granado.
Overall, this book is an interesting description of traveling alone through South America with correlations to Ernesto Guevara's own trip years before. The book could have been shorter and at the end I wished I read Che's own recollection of the events instead of this. If you are interested in the making of Che when he was still known as Ernesto Guevara I recommend reading this book to gain some insight into the events of his life from someone who has obviously studied the man thoroughly.
Oh and as a side note, for me the most interesting section of this book is the authors coffee shop meeting with a professor named Nestor Guevara (no relation to Che) who once trained under Che in Cuba. Starts on page 250.
Great intro to social histories of Latin America, road humor, and Che.
It speaks to the quirky nature of this book that the author, after studying and retracing Che Guevara's coming-of-age motorcycle journey, doesn't really seem to like Che too much. This is definitely not an obsessed groupie who wanted to zoom his motorcycle over the same dirt that his idol zoomed over. On the contrary, Symmes' goal seems to be to pour astringent on the foggy glaze that legend has painted over the reality of Che's life. He does quite a good job, melding together in a rambling rotation planned interviews, long asides based on historical research, personal anecdotes, and spontaneous dialogues with cooks, hotel clerks, and tire repairmen in cities and byways throughout Latin America. The whole package gives a picture of what people in various parts of Latin America really think about Che, and how the continent has been affected by his legacy. Turns out that there is a lot more to the legend of Che than t-shirts with his face on them.
Symmes respects the reader enough to uncork the key components of major philosophical and ideological debates regarding Latin American affaris. One can learn a lot about Che's version (misguided) of Communist theory in the course of this book. But these capsule discussions are interspersed in a larger tale and never become overbearing. Symmes has a good feel for when to cut the history lesson short and throw down a shot of humor or raw imagery. In short, the book is well-architected, tumbling from humor to reporting to history to philosophy and back around again. If you want to be a travel writer and need to work on pacing and variety, here's a good model.
Overall, one of the best things about this book is that Symmes hits that beautiful combination of a) doing his homework on Che and Latin American history, as shown throughout and b) putting that homework aside and letting the book and the journey come to him. Because the author prepared thoroughly, he had a context for what he saw on the journey and the book seems to have written itself.
By comparison, I found Symmes' style more palatable and less narcisstic and frivolous than that of Paul Theroux, a founding father of contemporary travel writing. The author writes with more of a sense of responsibility; it is clear that he feels a fundamental obligation to inform the reader objectively, in his own unconventional way to be sure, of the truth about Che and Latin America. He does not, as Theroux is known to do, overindulge in his descriptions of minor personal doings and observations as if they were high art simply because he did them. To be sure, Symmes does include anecdotes about his personal misadventures, but they are brief interludes and pit stops, and the big picture is always front and center in the headlights.
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