![Champagne and Meatballs Champagne and Meatballs](/assets/ea2f6e5/9781926836089-54323-510x590.jpg)
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 Beijing andMoscow. 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 the 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.
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Larry Hannant
Chapter 1. Early Years
Chapter 2. The 1930s
Chapter 3. The War
Chapter 4. Postwar Years
Chapter 5. Letters from China, with a foreword by Monica Whyte
Appendix
Notes
Index