Publisher Description
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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“This was a very entertaining and enlightening and very extensively researched recounting of the events leading up to Krushchevs 1956 visit to the US (including the “kitchen debate” in Moscow with then vice president Nixon”, the actual visit, and the follow up visit a year later when an enraged Kruschev banged his shoe at the UN and buddied up with Castro. As someone who remembers as a child sitting with my mom on the living room couch watching the cuban missile crisis speech and being terrified that we were going to be wiped out by a missile attack, I found my understanding of the times, Eisenhower and especially Krushchev greatly expanded. Who knew that Krushchev was so witty (if earthy) and quick witted?-not I, but I guess he had to be to survive as Stalin’s right hand man. I especially enjoyed the incident of how the American Dental Association stood up to him and the state department overd the battle of the ballroom…”
—
Bonnie (4 out of 5 stars)
