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Also by Peter Carlson:

Junius And Albert's Adventures In The Confederacy, June 2013
Hardcover
K Blows Top, June 2009
Hardcover

K Blows Top
Peter Carlson

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

PublicAffairs
June 2009
On Sale: June 1, 2009
352 pages
ISBN: 1586484974
EAN: 9781586484972
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History

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.

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