History

The motorcycle diaries is probably the best one for Che

David S. Reynolds's John Brown: Abolitionist has a few chapters on Brown's early life that will give you all you need there.

There's a recent biography of Toussaint Louverture, Black Spartacus, by Sudhir Hazareesingh, that does what it can to reconstruct Toussaint's early life.

Peniel Joseph's biography of Kwame Toure, Stokely: A Life, has barely anything about its subject post-1970, but has lots of detail on the leftist scene in NYC in the 1950s.

For Trotsky, he has about a hundred pages on his childhood in My Life, and the first volume of Deutscher's biography will also be useful.

It's been quite a while, but I remember appreciating Howard Zinn's "Growing Up Class Conscious" section of You Can't Stay Neutral on a Moving Train. Note that it's later in the book than you might expect.

Jonathan Spence's The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a history-through-group-biography of several revolutionary (and some non-revolutionary) Chinese figures, from pre-communists like Kang Youwei to Mao and beyond. Of particular interest might be the lives of Qu Qiubai and Ding Ling, both of whom Spence treats with affection.

It sounds like you might not want it, but there is an interesting section of Sartre's Search for a Method, a book where he tries to balance Marxism with existentialism, in which he defends the use of psychoanalysis as a way of explaining the ways in which people depart from the expectations and ideologies of their class. He takes Gustave Flaubert as his model and uses Flaubert's childhood to examine the author's loathing of the bourgeoisie he was born into. I'm not entirely sold, and I don't think much of Sartre's use of psychoanalysis in his own fiction, but it's an earnest grappling with the problem.

There's a recent novel about the young Ho Chi Minh. Haven't read it yet but it looks cool.

On this note, I once heard someone criticize Marx because he allegedly abandoned his children and treated his wife poorly.

I know Marx had to go into exile several times, but is there any merit to that? Or is that just an irrelevant Rightist talking-point?

oh yeah, and I'm somewhat open to sources that skew lib as long as they don't fuck up the history and don't immediately turn into Sigmund Freud after every little tidbit. I can cut out the commentary, I'd just prefer not to have to.

I'll recommend a biography of Gramsci, if only because it seems grimly relevant, and hopeful in these times. Born in the periphery of a nation with colonial aspirations, living first hand the multiple oppressions caused by his origin, his disability, and his unshakeable willingness to be one with the workers he founded the PCdI along with, meant that at the time when the contradictions of industrialization he was an instrumental figure to understand and act in "the time of monsters".

I haven't read Jean Yves Fretigné's new biography, but the consensus seems to be positive

I got a bunch of books for Stalin, im gonna wait until after work to really put out a list but off the top of my head Henri Barbusse was the authorized biographical writer for Stalin.

Alex Haley's autobiography of Malcolm X should be required reading, although it glosses over his sexuality that Manning Marble covers in A Life of Reinvention