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K Blows Top

A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted—"a surreal extravaganza," as one historian called it. Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home-economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe.

Published for the fiftieth anniversary of the trip, K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communist's road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in capitalist America, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the U.S. in 1959, following a visit to Russia by then-Vice President Richard Nixon. K, as the headlines called him at the time, personified the evil threat of Communism to Americans. His visit provoked thousands of newspaper articles on the trip, and they form the basis of this entertaining and informative story about "inviting the enemy into our camp." Both the humorous and explosive sides of the Russian leader's personality give narrator Malcolm Hillgartner ample material for his clever impersonation and faux accent. A studied parody of Nixon's unmistakable muttering chimes in here and there as well. Hillgartner's appropriate humor and announcer's voice act like a tour guide to American life and politics during the Cold War of the 1950s. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 6, 2009
      Although Punch
      magazine famously commented on the humor of Nikita Khrushchev’s desire to visit Disneyland during his 1959 trip to America, Carlson a former writer for the Washington Post
      , can still mine the tour with hilarious results, due in equal parts to Khrushchev’s outsized provocateur personality and the bizarre and thoroughly American reaction to his visit. Numerous secondary players provide comic support: then vice president Richard Nixon’s fixations on mano a mano debates with the quicksilver premier; Boston Brahmin and U.N. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Khrushchev’s tour guide, who dutifully filed daily analysis of Khrushchev’s public tantrums; popular gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who in a noteworthy example of bad taste attacked Mrs. Khrushchev’s attire. A host of other American icons also make appearances: among them Herbert Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra. Although Carlson’s focuses on the comic, there are insights into Khrushchev’s personality, many provided by his son Sergei, now a respected professor at Brown University, illuminating the method in Khrushchev’s madness. All in all, in Carson’s hands the cold war is a surprisingly laughing matter.

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  • English

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