Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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, she wouldn't be there unless I had given the order." But He was folksy, he smiled at pretty girls, he made jokes, and he was a natural showoff. He loved having newsmen and photographers around; he knew he could benefit from collaborating with them, and he made his travels the best television special America could have asked for.

He wound up his tour with an official visit to Camp David, where he and Ike did come up with a tentative agreement about Berlin, and he flew home to wild congratulations. Unfortunately, when Russia downed the U-2 spy plane the next year, he truculently refused any future cooperation, and when he came to the US a second time, his visit was restricted to New York where he was to address the United Nations. This was the scene of his most famous display of anger, pounding his shoe on his desk. (Carlson says it is so famous that millions of people can recall the film of the event and the repeated shoe-blows, but they are imagining seeing such a thing; it happened, but no one made a movie of it.) The year after that there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And in 1964, Khrushchev was oustered; he viewed even this as a success for the state, since no previous Soviet dictator could have been faced with being told he was no longer suitable and had to retire. His strange tour of the US was a step that kept up the strange status quo of the cold war while still being a diversion. Khrushchev might have been responsible for thousands of deaths, he might be bragging about how many rockets he could lob our way, but he was still a ham who made people laugh. It was a bizarre tour in a weird and distant time, and Carlson's drily hilarious day-by-day reconstruction of the visit makes for the funniest history book ever.

During the height of the cold war Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev spent two madcap weeks exploring 1959 America--kissing babies, hobnobbing with Hollywood stars, touring factories, and setting off riotous media stampedes in an Iowa cornfield and a San Francisco Quality Foods supermarket. Fortunately, Peter Carlson chronicles the whole ridiculous but revealing episode in K Blows Top, a window into the world as it was not so long ago. Khrushchev was alternately charismatic, infuriating, hot-headed, warm-hearted, wily and artless, and Americans were mesmerized in spite of themselves, fascinated, frightened and charmed.

While this is one of the funniest books I've read for a while, Carlson doesn't neglect the serious side of the story. Whatever goodwill was generated by Khrushchev's visit was lost when the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane in a mission that President Eisenhower only reluctantly approved. Both sides were angered and went into face-saving mode, ruining a multi-leader summit hosted by France's wryly frustrated Charles De Gaulle and leading to Khrushchev's UN shoe banging tantrum and the Cuban missile crisis. As Carlson presents him, Khrushchev is a temperamental conundrum who nevertheless brought real reform to the Soviet government after the bloody excesses of Stalin, as Khrushchev's own bloodless ousting by Leonid Brezhnev ironically proves.

Khrushev and Eisenhower were before my time. I missed out on an awesome era. Peter Carlson is hilarious! The way he researches and puts pieces together is incredibly ingenious. More Peter Carlson!

While I love history books, and Russian/Soviet history especially, the genre is not really known for its wit and laugh out loud moments. Most books on these topics are a bit on the dry side, although the underlying events are oftentimes fascinating and serve to keep the reader interested.

This book truly breaks the mold. Not only does Mr. Carlson recount the background and aftermath of Premier Khrushchev's groundbreaking trip to the United States, he does an excellent job of presenting the absurdity of each day of the trip in a way that makes you think you're reading a particularly witty novel. He also provides a great deal of insight about relevant historical events that helps someone born well after that period understand just how shocking this trip really was. The only modern equivalent would be if Kim Jong Il or Fidel Castro went on a week-long tour of the United States. The best part of the book, however, is its humor. I found myself chuckling or outright laughing at many different points in the book. I certainly can't say the same about most other books about the Cold War. Mr. Carlson is an excellent author; I just wish that he had other books that I could read! This appears to be his only book.

In sum, I highly recommend the book. Don't hesitate to pick it up. You'll be engrossed within the first couple pages and won't regret your purchase.

Pete Carlson's K Blows Top got its title from a headline regarding Nikita Khrushchev's temper during his goodwill visit to the United States in 1959. While Khrushchev lost his temper (or pretended to) numerous times during the trip, there were many light hearted moments on his trip as well. These light hearted moments and Carlson's clear writing make K Blows Up very enjoyable to read.

Carlson's prefaced Khrushchev's goodwill visit with chronicling Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union and followed it with Khrushchev's visit to the U.N. and his (in)famous shoe banging. These sections and an epilogue give K Blows Top a sense of wholeness and helped put Khrushchev's visit in historical context.

As the author acknowledged, K Blows Top is not a scholarly work, but it is quite informative. Carlson's references are authoritative and his bibliography is quite thorough.

As K Blows Top, is informative, well-organized, yet fun to read, in this reviewer's opinion it deserves five stars

I remember the civil defense drills and the Bay of Pigs action but I was pretty young and still in grammar school. Reading the background information filled in a lot of holes and the author made it all interesting; he brought in a lot of other intresting characters from that time period, many who are no longer with us.

This is a wonderful, well-paced book that does not claim to be scholarly, but is in fact rich in factual detail; the background research is obvious. "K Blows Top" is as much a Cold War history lesson as it is a mood piece of a time that many of us did not live in (or, as in my case, were too young to understand). Khrushchev's visit turns out to be, in retrospect, the first media feeding frenzy driven by round-the-clock TV coverage. There's an incident in the book about a stampede / trashing of a supermarket during the Soviet leader's visit that's worth the read in itself.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the 20th century. The book's strongest suit is the fact that it's almost exclusively based on the actual media reports (well, U.S. media reports) of Khrushchev's visits to America. The author was able to combine them into something very entertaining, humorous and useful. Great book!