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Book Jacket K BLOWS TOP
A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist
PETER CARLSON
SUMMARY  |  EXCERPT   |  QUOTES
This hilarious account of Khrushchev's 1959 U.S. tour is also a supremely entertaining evocation of the history and atmosphere of Cold War America

Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted—"a surreal extravaganza," as historian John Lewis Gaddis 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. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America.

Peter Carlson is a former feature writer and columnist for The Washington Post, where he wrote the weekly 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.

National radio publicity
Print features and reviews
Author appearances
HARDCOVER
ISBN 978-1-58648-497-2
Pub date: 06/01/09
Price: $26.95/31.00 Canada
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
368 pages
8 pp. b/w photos
Carton Quantity: 20
History
Selling Territory: W
Rights: First serial, British Commonwealth, Audio & Electronic Rights: PublicAffairs
Performance and Translation, Rights: Mendel Media Group

PAPERBACK
ISBN 978-1586488468
Pub date: 07/06/10
Price: $14.95/18.95 Canada
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
352 pages
8 pp. b/w photo insert
Carton Quantity: 40
History
Selling Territory: W
Pub history: 978-1586484972

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