K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist

(Paperback)

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Description

Khrushchevs 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted. 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. K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communists road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in America, 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 who possessed the power to incinerate America.

Reviews

Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History and Baker Institute Fellow at Rice University
"What a joy it was to read Peter Carlson's "K Blows Top," With vivid detail, crisp language, subtle wit, and admirable new research, Carlson recounts Khrushchev's notorious bungling around America in 1959. A truly fine piece of writing and Cold War scholarship."

Christopher Buckley, author of "Thank You for Smoking" and "Supreme Courtship"
"Peter Carlson's K Blows Top is an utterly hilarious and un-putdown-able story about one of the strangest episodes of the Cold War -- Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the U.S. Someone absolutely has to make this into a movie. I insist!"

The Daily Beast, from Christopher Buckley, author of "Thank you for Smoking "and "Little Green Men"
"I can't remember when I've had more fun with a book...simply hilarious."

Steve Coll, author of "Ghost Wars" and "The Bin Ladens."
"Any work of history whose chapter titles include "It Killed Milton Berle and It Can Kill You Too" and "Chihuahuas For Khrushchev" deserves to be read. Like the mid-century journalists who chronicled this Strangelovian chapter of the Cold War, Peter Carlson writes with wit, energy, clarity, and delightful skepticism. This book seems to have been a joy to write; it is certainly a joy to read."

Daniel Schorr, Senior News Analyst, National Public Radio
"This book recreates in vivid detail one of the most astonishing figures in our recent history. The Communist leader's storming of America can be enjoyed by everyone, but especially those with memories of that singular episode in the winding down of the Cold War."

Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History and Baker Institute Fellow at Rice University
"What a joy it was to read Peter Carlson's "K Blows Top," With vivid detail, crisp language, subtle wit, and admirable new research, Carlson recounts Khrushchev's notorious bungling around America in 1959. A truly fine piece of writing and Cold War scholarship."

Author Bio

Peter Carlson is a former feature writer and columnist for The Washington Post, where he wrote the column The Magazine Reader." The author of Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, and a co-author- with Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton, among others- of The Gospel According to ESPN, he lives in Rockville, MD.