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

I really enjoyed this book. I would have never picked this book to read, it was chosen by a member of my Book Club. I learned a lot. It stimulated "flashbacks" to my childhood fears of that period of time and gave me the opportunity to understand more.

This is a great little slice of history that unbelievably no one has mined before in a book. It's also hard to fathom why no documentary of this celebrity-studded itinerary has been made, which was covered extensively by all possible media. Carlson does a superior job of highlighting the ups and downs of the mercurial Khruschev's (known as "K" in the papers) tour of his arch enemy. He leaves no anecdote unturned, from Marilyn Monroe's snide remarks about the fat little Russian to the mayor of LA's rude and provocative greetings to "K's" having to crawl out of a stuck elevator. The image of the ultimate commie being feted by the bourgeois glitterati of Hollywood (Reagan notably refused to attend) is worth a movie in itself. This is a perfect time capsule capture of a paranoid and insecure time in this country, starring a flamboyant Bolshevik personality that all agreed would have made a formidable American politico.

The Cold War is over; we won it and we have forgotten about it, because we have hotter things to worry about. Young people now, and those in the future, will watch, say, Doctor Strangelove, and be astonished that the world could have organized itself in such a way. If you really want to get in touch with how weird the Cold War years were, a wonderful introduction is _K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist_ (PublicAffairs) by Peter Carlson. Carlson describes himself as "the world's most zealous (and perhaps only) Khrushchev-in-America buff". He is a reporter who used to amuse himself by looking through holdings of the Time-Life library. When on a whim he asked about clippings from Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the US, the librarian said, "Are you sure you want them all?" This was a huge story at the time, and there was a mountain of clippings, including the one from which the title of the book comes: "Denied Tour of Disneyland, K Blows Top". No, he never got to Disneyland, but he got to plenty of other places he wanted to go, and others the State Department wanted him to go, and it was a very weird thirteen days. This is why the phrase "media circus" was invented. Carlson's hilarious book tells a lot about Khrushchev, but also a lot about America and Americans of the time. Many of the funny situations in Carlson's book have to do with the clashes of how Khrushchev saw himself compared to how his hosts saw him. He arrived in Washington in his new TU-114 aircraft, which he was proud of because although he had been warned that it might have mechanical problems, it was the world's tallest aircraft. Eisenhower was there to greet him, however glumly, and gave a speech about universal peace, while his guest waved to the crowd, mugged, winked, and held his homburg over his head like a sunshade. He didn't just fail to get to Disneyland; there were plenty of offers he could not take advantage of from Americans who were curious about him. Officials in Houston offered to guide him through "some very attractive Negro subdivisions." The Jaycees wanted to give him a Russian translation of the Jaycee creed. A Philadelphia store sent him some shoes and requested he visit them so he could learn how "strong and healthy feet make for a strong and healthy America." Khrushchev was invited to enter a float at the Apple Festival Parade in La Crescent, Minnesota. Louis Armstrong suggested he get to a jazz club to witness "the swingin' feel of freedom." In Los Angeles, as his motorcade went by, Khrushchev saw a woman holding a sign that said, "Death to Khrushchev, the Butcher of Hungary." He was furious, and exploded to Lodge, "If Eisenhower wanted to have me insulted, why did he invite me to come to the United States?" It took some time to sort out that Americans put up whatever signs they want, and do not do so at the behest of the government. Khrushchev was baffled: "In the Soviet Union, sh

Journalist Peter Carlson is a pioneer of sorts. He is apparently the first author in the US to write a book-length account of Soviet Union chairman Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the US. For good measure and to set the tone he begins the book with a short descriptive account of Vice President Richard Nixon's earlier 1959 visit to the USSR and concludes it with a little encore featuring K's second trip to the US ---the famous 1960 visit to the United Nations when he took off his shoe and banged it in protest. The book consists of 82 very short and readable chapters. Carlson knows how to write humorously. The book is hilarious. Really. If you read it, you'll be chuckling on every page, I predict. No. Make that several times per page! The lion's share of the book chronicles K's 2 week 1959 tour of the US, from DC to LA and back, including famous stops along the way at an Iowa corn farm and a Pittsburgh steel mill. Oh, I almost forgot the cafeteria at IBM headquarters in San Jose. What really impressed him at IBM was not their computers (K. figured his Russian computers must be pretty good if his guys could hit the moon, which they had done shortly before K. arrived in the US), but he'd never apparently eaten at a self-serve cafeteria. He was bowled over by this and afterwards made sure some were built in his country. The book might/could/should have been a bit shorter, but the author had compiled all this good stuff from newspapers and the Time-Life archives and probably figured he HAD to use it all. (He also has consulted works on the time period by historians such as Gaddis and Beschloss.) But if you don't want to or can't read everything here, do not miss chapter 57 entitled "A Riot in the Cathedral of Capitalism". You'll never guess what this chapter is about until you read it. The chapter is a scream; I laughed so much I cried. K BLOWS TOP is a good reminder of the cold war era for those of us who lived through it and probably a rather painless introduction to it for younger readers. Read the Prologue and you'll be hooked. Tim Koerner July 2009

What a delightful book! As a young teenager, all I knew about Mr. Khrushchev was that we had to practice "duck and cover," my parents spoke solemnly of the Soviet Threat, and the words "atomic" and "nuclear" seemed to saturate our daily lives. Peter Carlson has given us a fine, well-researched story to show the reality of Khrushchev as opposed to the headlines we all remember. The author has an agile facility with metaphors - "a massive head that looked like one of the statues found on Easter Island" and the telling quote from his research quoting Khrushchev as saying, "The most dangerous form of resistance . . . is when they yes you to death." "K Blows Top" is a grand story full of humour, insight, and historical information. Whether a reader cares about Mr K or not, this book is a keeper.