Bernie Taft is a veteran Australian communist who was involved in many of the key historic moments of the twentieth century, and his memoir "Crossing the Party Line" gives his side of the story on them.

As a young man, the Jewish Taft escaped Nazi Germany on the last train before the borders were closed, and found himself in Australia, and dedicated his life to communism. He charts the heights of communism in the late 1940s, where it seemed only a matter of time before the capitalist system collapsed and was replaced by workers' paradise, to the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and the slow demise of the Communist Party of Australia, complete with splits, spolinter parties and Adelaide tendencies that eventually led to the shuttering of the CPA in the early 1990s. In between, Taft heads overseas to attend international communist conferences and meets all sorts of communist heroes and villians.

And in case you were worried that Taft would end depressed, with the failure of all he had worked for, don't be too sad for him; Taft ends the book in a relationship with a much younger actress who appeared in various Australian sex comedies. ( )