2016 read #68: The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Translated by Alexandra Keeble
Prefaces by Aleida Guevara March, introduction by Cintio Vitier
175 pages
Published 1995; English translation published 2003
Read from August 29 to September 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

My first exposure to Che was in a Hot Topic. It was 2002, and I was 19; having gone directly from an abusive childhood into the army, self-expression was still a new concept for me. One weekend, on break from training, I went with my then-friend to the mall, and after our customary Saturday Cinnabon I ventured into the Hot Topic, where I saw a shirt in a blinding shade of red, emblazoned with the cliched image of Che's face. I was struck by, but at that age unable to articulate, the fine irony of a symbol of rebellion and revolution commoditized and sold to teenagers from a franchise shopfront. That was my rationale for purchasing it over the protests and disbelief of my army friend (who would, of course, go on to be a racist conservative asshole later in life). Over the ensuing months, after my own political awakening, I wore it with proud new layers of irony on the army bases where I was stationed -- a further irony, one I didn't appreciate until later, being my own utter ignorance of Che.

Che himself, as a man and as a symbol, was someone I hadn't thought much about beyond that initial set of ironies. His existence, actions, and ideology seem to be crushed beneath the weight of Che the symbol. To the regressives of the world, he's a hypocrite and a war criminal, guilty of vast (and usually vague) atrocities; to certain segments of the ever-divided left, he's a martyred saint, his every word dissected for hidden wisdom, as in the hagiographic introduction to this volume. Not to get all "the truth is in the middle" here, but in this instance, I'm pretty sure the reality is not close to either of those extremes.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating introduction to the young man who existed before the myth, a polished and edited "journal" of a bumbling expedition, by motorbike and by hitch, across several Latin American nations in 1952. The formative effect this had upon young Che's outlook, priorities, and ideology are obvious, though kept mostly between the lines; Che's tight-lipped indignation at the appalling poverty and class structures he encounters are the most interesting, and affecting, sections of the book. The rest, sadly, has something of a superficial feel to it. Despite the editorial efforts of an older Che (or possibly others), it feels obvious that this was a young student's travel diary, its tone alternately flippant and philosophical -- it would be easy to imagine, say, a college radio DJ writing something similar today, after a summer spent in search of "authenticity." Like a college dude, Che drops casual bits of homophobia and racial prejudice -- though, equally apropos, we could say "Like any dude in the 1950s." The travel portions tend toward the repetitive, fascinating interludes abbreviated in favor of enumerations of hunger, bad drivers, sleeping in police stations, and caging meals from reluctant, or naively enthusiastic, strangers.

It's a shame that Soviet-style Communism, in its day, was as corrupt and oligarchic, as reliant upon hegemonic colonialism, as capitalism has always tended to be. Through his writings, at least, it seems Che was a genuine revolutionary, a believer in the ideals he fought and eventually died for. This edition's appendix, taken from a speech Che gave to Havana medical students in 1960, is flush with revolutionary fervor, with utopian visions of "the new kinds of human beings born in Cuba." Like Che himself, the balance between social organization and individualism is ambiguous, multifaceted, perhaps impossible to resolve -- and certainly too ambitious for me to tackle in a simple book review.

2013 read #126: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
353 pages
Published 2007
Read from September 27 to September 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Ever since I was 12, I have had music almost constantly stuck in my head. It began when my father had taken me and fled from Ohio after my brother had ran away to live with our mother's family. It was a disordered time, a time of escalation for my father's debilitating paranoia; while I, having lost my only "friend" and point of stability in the world, was left trying to cling to fragments of my old life (I resumed writing, with a persistent idea of showing off my stories to Randy after he "came back"), Eric was desperately trying to shed effects and belongings and ties, streamlining (as he thought) his efforts to seek "asylum" for us in various foreign countries. The car that drew us west lacked a working radio, and Eric kept hold of only two or three cassettes, one of which was the Moody Blues' Seventh Sojourn. As autumn chilled the plains and volcanic mesas of western New Mexico, I heard Seventh Sojourn again and again and again, the only music I knew for months; when Eric grew sick of the repetition and refused to play the tape, I reconstructed it note by note, song by song in my head. I could begin with the opening thrum and drums of "Lost in a Lost World" and replay the album all the way to the whistling and clapping and synthesizer blurt that closed out "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)." From those cramped, crippling days more than half a lifetime ago, I've rarely known more than a few minutes' peace from the intrusions of musical earworms.

Whether because of this or just out of general intellectual curiosity, the subject of music's effect on the brain has long fascinated me. And since I already like the work of Oliver Sacks, this book was an obvious choice. Although Sacks is a fluent writer, his neurological works are, necessarily, oriented for the appreciation of lay readers. "Tales" is indeed an apt description of Musciophilia's contents; Sacks describes various patients and correspondents, an edifyingly broad array of musical pathologies and anomalies, but I came away from it not feeling that I understood much more than I had before. Sacks' analysis rarely delves beyond the correlation between certain neurological abnormalities and musical maladies and prodigies; a line from the closing paragraph, "Music is part of being human," is just about all I took away from this book. Granted, anything more involved would get technical quite rapidly, and the "purpose" of humanity's musicality is of course the topic of unresolved (perhaps unresolvable) debate. I can't fault Sacks for his safe, descriptive format, but Musicophilia felt more like a list of neurological curiosities than anything insightful.

2013 read #111: The Island of the Colorblind, and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks.

The Island of the Colorblind, and Cycad Island by Oliver Sacks
263 pages
Published 1996
Read August 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise brought this book to my attention, mentioning the achromatopsic islanders of Pingelap in passing as representative of a whole other type of society, a scotopic existence flourishing in the to us "unreliable" light of dawn, dusk, and moon. Meloy exaggerated a bit, if I remember correctly -- I certainly came away from Turquoise with the impression that "entire villages" functioned in the half light of crepuscular times. Right from the start, Sacks establishes that no more than 10-15% of the islanders are achromatopsic, still a remarkable population, but nothing like the "Wellsian" fantasy implicit in the title, a fantasy Sacks freely (and winsomely) confesses to harboring before his journey to Pingelap.

But I don't need a fully colorblind society to enjoy this book. This sounds seriously awkward and weird, but between this book and Sacks' Oaxaca Journal, I feel as if I would really enjoy being this guy's friend. His scarcely buried desire to be a Victorian polymath and naturalist, his lack of natural social graces, his charmingly frank admission of romantic notions nurtured by Wells and Conan Doyle, his love of ancient plants and his "profound sense of being at home" in cycad forests and other glimpses of deep time -- I think he and I would get along, in some possibly creepy fanboy dimension. I've never felt that about an author before. While you may rest assured I won't be hiding in the ferns outside his house any time soon, I do feel that reading his books -- especially the more rambly books where he mingles ancient botany with all the neuroscience -- is a terrific treat.

Incidentally, I hate books with endnotes I actually have to read. I love all the extra information, but I hate having to flip between two parts of a book and maintaining two bookmarks as I go. This is exactly the reason footnotes were invented.