Active for over forty years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during the Second World War, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow. But Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a great yarn. In Champagne and Meatballs 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 the Second World War, and of surviving as a dissident in troubled times make for compelling reading.