Champagne and meatballs : adventures of a Canadian communist

Active for over forty years with the Communist Party of Canada, BertWhyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldierduring the Second World War, and a press correspondent in Beijingand Moscow.

But any notion of him as a Communist party hack would bemistaken.

Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a greatyarn.

In Champagne and Meatballs — a memoir written notlong before his death in Moscow in 1984 — we meet a cigar-smokingrogue who was at least as happy at a pool hall as at a politicalmeeting.

His stories of bumming across Canada in the 1930s, of combatand camaraderie at the front lines in Second World War, and ofsurviving as a dissident in troubled times make for compellingreading. The manuscript of Champagne and Meatballs was brought tolight and edited by historian Larry Hannant, who has written afascinating and thought-provoking introduction to the text.

Brash,irreverent, informative, and entertaining, Whyte’s tale ishistory and biography accompanied by a wink of his eye — the leftone, of course.