Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

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Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amisâ€™s award-winning memoir, Experience.

Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century â€” one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The authorâ€™s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a â€œComintern dogsbodyâ€ (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsynâ€™s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere â€œstatistic.â€ Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalinâ€™s aphorism.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Brand Vintage
Manufacturer Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber Illustrated
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2003-09-09
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781400032204

Country	USA
Brand	Vintage
Manufacturer	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	Illustrated
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2003-09-09
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781400032204

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

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