Champagne and Meatballs

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.

Larry Hannant is a Canadian historian specializing intwentieth-century political dissent. He is the author of TheInfernal Machine: Investigating the Loyalty of Canada'sCitizens and the editor of The Politics of Passion: NormanBethune's Writing and Art, which won the Robert S. KennyPrize in Left/Labour Studies. He also researched and co-wrote afeature-length documentary film on the Doukhobors, The SpiritWrestlers, which was broadcast on History Television. He currentlyteaches at Camosun College and the University of Victoria.