In the spring of 1952, two young men set out by motorcycle on an ambitious, footloose journey that they hoped would carry them from Buenos Aires up the spine of Chile, across the Andes and into the Peruvian Amazon. (They made it, a little behind schedule, though the unfortunate motorcycle did not.)

What "The Motorcycle Diaries" captures, with startling clarity and delicacy, is the quickening of Guevara's youthful idealism, and the gradual turning of his passionate, literary nature toward an as yet unspecified form of radical commitment.