is a biography of the radical intellectual Guido Baracchi, a founder of the Communist Party of Australia. The book traces Baracchi's political career from his support for the Industrial Workers of the World to his association with the Trotskyist Fourth International; it also examines his turbulent personal life and his relationships with writers such as Katharine Susannah Prichard, Lesbia Harford and Betty Roland. It was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award.

This is a biography of Guido Baracchi, a well-heeled, literate bohemian and committed Marxist/Communist who lived from 1887 to 1975, described by Stuart Macintyre as 'the knight errant of Australian communism'. He's a terrific subject for biography: he worked for the cause in Weimar Germany and the 1930s Soviet Union; he had intense relationships with a number of poets and playwrights (Lesbia Harford, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Betty Roland), each of whom left rich accounts this biography has drawn on; he was widely read and wrote a lot himself, also supplying a wealth of material to his biographer. I was telling some friends about the book, and one woman was prompted to talk of her romance when young with a son of a leading Communist family: when they were about to go out on a date, he would say, 'Let's stay home tonight -- the old coms are coming around and there'll be lots of tales.' I suspect Jeff Sparrow had a background something like that, because while this book meticulously cites its written sources (discreetly up the back), and doesn't hang back from quoting T S Eliot and James Joyce to good effect, it's also bursting at the seams with 'tales', with the lore of Australian Communism: clever ploys, bastardry, romance, betrayal, nobility (like Guido's wife Neura's principled reaction to the news that he had taken up with Betty Roland, then Davies, from which she seems never to have wavered), tragedy (which may be too pallid a word for what Stalin and Stalinism did to the hopes of the world). You can almost hear the stories being told with suitable embellishment at a kitchen table far into the night.

As the story unfolds, what today is called the mainstream media comments from the margins: for example, as we follow the travails of the tiny Australian Marxist movement of the early 20s, bitterly divided within itself, devoting most of its energies to self-education, and discouraged at the prospect of ever being effective, we learn that Prime Minister Bruce gets headlines by accusing the Labor Party of pandering to Bolshevism, and thus, as Jeff Sparrow remarks, succeeds 'in elevating communism into a public issue in a way that the communists themselves found impossible'. Sadly, the MSM version has become received wisdom, and a whole dimension of our history has been largely forgotten. Those who deplore black armband history would no doubt equally deplore this, perhaps as 'red tie history'. I can't recommend it enough -- for that worthy reason, but also because it is a ripping good read, another example of history written with the verve and imaginative force that some think is the exclusive domain of the novel. ( )