Published for the fiftieth anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev's road trip across America, K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel.
Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted. He told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed coeds in an Iowa home-economics class, and ogled Shirley MacLaine. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller and Marilyn Monroe. The trip took place in the fifties, 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 with the power to incinerate America.
"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."
About the Author
Peter Carlson is a former journalist and feature writer for the Washington Post and People magazine. He is the author of Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood and co-author—with Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton, among others—of The Gospel According to ESPN. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.
