AUDIOBOOK
K Blows Top
A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist
Peter Carlson4.3
(7)
About
Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted. He told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed coeds in an Iowa home-economics class, and ogled Shirley MacLaine. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller and Marilyn Monroe. The trip took place in the fifties, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man with the power to incinerate America.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"Peter Carlson's K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist may be the most entertaining historical account you'll ever read."
Washington Post's Express
"Carlson seems to have sought and discovered every piece of arcana associated with the Soviet leader's American sojourn. A deft and amusing writer, Carlson does a marvelous job of recounting it."
Washington Post
"The linked sketches of Khrushy's boozy, mercurial meanderings through New York, Hollywood, and the Iowa State Fair are jaw-dropping in an era of stage-managed diplomacy. Well beyond travelogue, the book is also a portrait of a more naive, optimistic nation in the heat of the nuclear age."
Boston Globe