Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs
Champagne and Meatballs
Adventures of a Canadian Communist
- Publisher
- Athabasca University Press
- Initial publish date
- Feb 2011
- Category
- Personal Memoirs, General, Leadership, Political, Communism & Socialism
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781926836348
- Publish Date
- Feb 2011
- List Price
- $29.99
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781926836089
- Publish Date
- Feb 2011
- List Price
- $29.95
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Description
Active for over forty years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during World War II, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow. But any notion of him as a Communist party hack would be mistaken. Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a great yarn. In Champagne and Meatballs — a memoir written not long before his death in Moscow in 1984 — we meet a cigar-smoking rogue who was at least as happy at a pool hall as at a political meeting. His stories of bumming across Canada in the 1930s, of combat and camaraderie at the front lines in World War II, and of surviving as a dissident in troubled times make for compelling reading.
The manuscript of Champagne and Meatballs was brought to light and edited by historian Larry Hannant, who has written a fascinating and thought-provoking introduction to the text. Brash, irreverent, informative, and entertaining, Whyte's tale is history and biography accompanied by a wink of his eye.
About the authors
Active for over forty years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during World War II, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow.
Larry Hannant is a Canadian historian specializing in twentieth-century political dissent. He is the author of The Infernal Machine: Investigating the Loyalty of Canada's Citizens and the editor of The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art, which won the Robert S. Kenny Prize in Left/Labour Studies. He also researched and co-wrote a feature-length documentary film on the Doukhobors, The Spirit Wrestlers, which was broadcast on History Television in 2002. He currently teaches at Camosun College and the University of Victoria.