Award-winning travel book provides a perfect companion reader to director Walter Salles’ ‘The Motorcycle Diaries.'

OAKLAND, CA September 8, 2004 -- Brazilian director Walter Salles’ latest movie, ‘The Motorcycle Diaries,’ promises to boost sales of Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling Through Castro’s Cuba, Christopher P. Baker’s award-winning literary mirror-image of the Salle movie. Mi Moto Fidel provides a perfect companion reader to the movie, due for release on September 24, 2004.
   
Based on an adaptation of Che Guevara’s account of his six-month odyssey around South America in 1952 on a 500cc Norton motorcycle, ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ reveals the youthful Argentinian’s extraordinary coming of age in a rite of passage that parallels that of Mi Moto Fidel. Baker’s own motorcycle diary – winner of both the 2002 Lowell Thomas Award “Travel Book of the Year” and the “Grand Prize” in the North American Travel Journalist Association’s Awards of Excellence – records the author’s own emotionally and erotically charged three-month, 7,000-mile peregrination through Cuba, undertaken in 1996 on a 1,000cc BMW motorcycle.
   
The film, starring Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as the young Che Guevara, depicts how Che’s journey sparked a dawning of his social conscience that would propel the future guerrilla leader into a revolutionary icon worldwide. Che’s tilt toward communism found its full blossoming when he became Cuba’s Minister of Finance & Industry following the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. Four decades later, Baker’s journey through the forbidden, adoptive island of Che spawns its own epiphanies, resulting in a remarkable travelog that Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, calls “a bittersweet glimpse of life inside the last Marxist utopia.”
   
“Philosophically Che and I started at a similar reference point; ultimately, by contrast, my own Cuban journey tilted me the other way,” writes Baker, winner of numerous literary awards and the author of five books about Cuba, including the recently-released Cuba Classics: A Celebration of Vintage American Automobiles.
   
Mi Moto Fidel (National Geographic Adventure Press, 2001) has been widely acclaimed for its deeply-scored portraits and penetrating analysis. “This is a wonderful adventure book...a meditation on philosophy, politics, and the possibilities of physical love. It has the depth of a novel and the feeling of a great love story,” commented the Lowell Thomas Award judges.
   
Paperback editions are available wherever books are sold. Hardback copies are available through the author: www.travelguidebooks.com





This article courtesy of http://motorcyclescene.com.
You may freely reprint this article on your website or in
your newsletter provided this courtesy notice and the author
name and URL remain intact.

Submit Your Article