Well…all right…So the progression from emerging market debt crises to the cult of a dead Marxist revolutionary isn’t exactly obvious. But then, Michael’s career has never gone in a straight line.

After graduating in 1987 from the University of Western Australia in his hometown of Perth Michael was struck by the wanderlust that afflicts many of his countrymen in their early-20s. He tried to sate it, financing his travels with part-time tree-lopping work in Miami, temp bookkeeping in London and pretend English teaching in Bangkok. Returning home to pursue a graduate diploma in English at Curtin University, he finally landed what was intended as a steady job at The West Australian. But although Michael started out covering such things as the daily weather and town council meetings, he ended up farther afield again, providing the paper with an award-winning account of Burma’s civil war and covering the imprisonment of three Aussies in a squalid Philippine jail.

A Rotary scholarship translated into a Masters in Asian studies at Cornell University in upstate New York. After that, it was off to Jakarta, where Michael helped launch AFX-Asia, a startup equity news service; and two years later, to New York and a reporting job for Dow Jones Newswires covering currencies, bonds and economic policy. More recently, Buenos Aires became home. There, Michael has spent the past six years as Dow Jones bureau chief and as a regular correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. You can find some of his other scribblings here.

This eclectic set of experiences helped cultivate a different perspective on social phenomena and laid the early foundation for Che’s Afterlife. It started with Michael’s coverage of the anti-free market “Piquetero” protest movement, which emerged out of Argentina’s financial crisis at the beginning of this decade, and was later fed by writing about the rise of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. A Latin American leftist backlash was happening, he noticed, at the same time that the developing countries from which it came – including those with nominally socialist governments - were increasingly engaging with global capitalism. It was as much a symbolic rebellion as a classic Marxist revolution, Michael concluded, noting that it was dominated by a single symbol: that of Che Guevara. Not just any Guevara image, but the same very graphic he had spotted frequently in his travels, including in an incongruous pairing with Rambo on the mudflaps of a Tuk-Tuk in Bangkok. Questions were asked: Why that image? Where did it come from? What made it so big? How has it survived for so long? How can it continue to be both a symbolic weapon in a post-Cold War ideological standoff and an instrument of capitalism? Can the distinction even been made? A book idea was born and, three years later, was made real.

Michael is married to Alicia Carmona, who completed her PhD in cultural anthropology during their stay in Buenos Aires. Her insights into Bolivia, a subject of her studies, and her lessons on how to see things differently have been invaluable. Michael and Alicia have two well-traveled, multi-passport-carrying girls, Zoe and Analia.