Detailed view for the Book: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Title:

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
 

Authors:

Genres:

Biographical
Historical
Non-Fiction

Editions:

# Date Publisher Binding Cover
1 2002-00-00 Vintage  

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Blurb: 
Amis is the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, and Amis fils recalls his father"s affiliation with communism in the 1930s and, along with his "Oxford comrades," their ignorance of Stalin"s "domestic cataclysms," namely the Soviet dictator"s massacre of anyone who could possibly be thought to be a dissident -- the total of which numbered in the millions. Such recollections lead the younger Amis to ponder Stalin"s life story; the title of this book refers to a Stalin nickname. Amis" provocative book, the majority of which is given over to the Stalin profile, proves to be difficult reading -- not for the style, to be sure, which is rich without being dense ("An additional ten IQ points in Kerensky might have saved Russia from Lenin"), but more for the dark subject matter ("Corpse-disposal was a national tribulation throughout the period of hard Bolshevism, which ended in 1953"). This extended essay presents, in no uncertain terms, the misguidedness of the Western intelligentsia"s seduction by the maniacally secretive Stalin in the years before the cold war.