Champagne and Meatballs

Cigar-smoking rabble-rouser and Communist Bert Whyte was known bymany as a most charming storyteller.

Bert Whyte’s fascinating memoir of life as an underground historical rogue who spent 40 years navigating left-wing politics and communism in Canada.

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.