Biography
Book Details

Communism

A Love Story

Jeff Sparrow

The only son of a famous astronomer, Guido Baracchi helped launch Australia's Communist Party and served, for a time, as its leading intellectual.

Awards

Shortlisted for the 2007 Colin Roderick Award

Opinion

'A portrait of the utopian dream and its politics that reads with all the passion and drama of a novel.' AMANDA LOHREY

It is Sparrow's lucid exposition of communism's seductive claim to provide, via the theory of dialectical materialism, the one big answer to the question of our past, present and future place in the world that makes us aware that in many ways Marxism is the flip-side of Catholicism.
Ross Fitzgerald, The Australian, 7.2.2007

About this Title

'Meet Guido Baracchi, the playboy communist who lived a life as vivid as any soap opera . . .

The only son of a famous astronomer, Guido Baracchi helped launch Australia's Communist Party and served, for a time, as its leading intellectual. The Sun dubbed him 'Melbourne's Lenin', while ASIO classified him 'a person of bad moral character and violent and unstable political views'.

He battled Robert Menzies at university, worked as a professional revolutionary in Weimar Berlin, survived Stalin's Russia and went to gaol in Melbourne. He romanced-and broke the hearts of-many beautiful, intelligent women, including the novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, the poet Lesbia Harford and the playwright Betty Roland.

Stylish, wealthy, with a taste for literature and the arts, Guido Baracchi was never a typical fellow traveller, and the Communist Party expelled him twice. But long after many more orthodox radicals gave up the struggle Guido continued to fight.

For more than seventy years, romantics and rebels of all stripes saw in the Communist Party the best hope for a world remade. Here is also the story of those who dedicated themselves to that beautiful dream, their experience of its shimmering promise-and of its shattering collapse.

Impassioned, witty and moving, Communism: A Love Story rediscovers a fascinating life-and makes a provocative argument about the history and the future of politics in Australia.

About the Author

Jeff Sparrow has been a bookseller, health worker and political activist. He is the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, and the reviews editor of Overland magazine.

978-0-522-85347-6