SOURCE: "Guerrilla Saint," in The New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1968, pp. 3, 34-5.

In the following review, Gall analyzes several works by Guevara, tracing the development of his ideological position as revealed in his political essays.

The capture and murder last October in Bolivia of Ernesto "Che" Guevara was the most significant consequence of his own botched guerrilla insurgency. The story of his death—still subject to final refinement of detail—adds new mythic material to the reverence most Latin Americans feel for martyred guerrilla saints like Mexico's Emiliano Zapata. Nicaragua's Augusto Sandino and Colombia's rebel priest, Father Camilo Torres. Moreover, in Guevara's case, the flame of publicity has lighted candles in the literary salons of New York and Paris, as well as in the official eulogies of the Cuban Revolution and in the imagination of revolutionary youth throughout the world. The shadow, of course, has dwarfed the...