K blows top

a Cold War comic interlude starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's most unlikely tourist

Hardcover, 327 pages

English language

Published May 28, 2009 by PublicAffairs.

ISBN:
978-1-58648-497-2
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OCLC Number:
191926312

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K Blows Top is the hilarious true story of a stranger in a strange land. The stranger was Nikita Khrushchev, the fat-bellied, thin-skinned, funny, cranky premier of the Soviet Union. The strange land was America in the 50s, a world of tail fins, movie stars, missile silos, and duck-and-cover drills. Khrushchev's bizarre 1959 trip across America was, as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it, "a surreal extravaganza." For two weeks at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev traveled from coast to coast, scaring some Americans and amusing others. "K" -- as the headline writers called him -- shadowboxed with Nelson Rockefeller, insulted Richard Nixon, irked Ike, impressed Elizabeth Taylor, grossed out Marilyn Monroe, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He also told jokes, threatened atomic war, shocked the United Nations, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in an …

2 editions

Subjects

  • Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, -- 1894-1971 -- Travel -- United States
  • Cold War
  • United States -- Foreign relations -- Soviet Union
  • Soviet Union -- Foreign relations -- United States