Khrushchev Nikita Sergeevich - K blows top: a Cold War comic interlude starring Nikita Khrushchev, Americas most unlikely tourist

Prologue : K blows top -- Trip One : The heat in the kitchen. Dueling proverbs -- Arguing about animal dung -- Khrushchev takes the Pepsi challenge -- The kitchen debate -- Nixon gets zapped -- How many nukes does it take to wipe out England? -- The new party line on love -- Nixon gets drunk -- Khrushchevs coming! Khrushchevs coming! -- Trip Two : A surreal extravaganza. The worst human being on earth -- What should K see? -- Shooting the moon -- K meets J. Edgar Hoover -- Fondling animals -- Khrushchev throws a tantrum -- Communism is like my wart -- The premier tells a Jewish joke -- The dentists fight back -- Stuck in an elevator -- Bronx cheers in New York -- Khrushchev fever sweeps Hollywood -- Nikita meets Marilyn -- Can-Can -- Khrushchev fakes a tantrum -- Barnstorming to San Francisco -- Mankinds face is more beautiful than its backside -- J. Edgar Hoover gets caught with his pants down -- A riot in the cathedral of capitalism -- A Cossack charge in Coon Rapids, Iowa -- Communist dictator in a home ec class -- Camp David -- Chasing butterflies -- The first to be shot -- Chihuahuas for Khrushchev -- Stormy applause -- Trip Three : The banging of the shoe. Spy in the sky -- Obligatory sex scene -- That son of a bitch, Richard Nixon -- Rendezvous with Fidel -- The guest who wouldnt leave -- Banging the shoe -- I feel vicious, malicious, and low! -- Epilogue : Life is a cosmic joke.;Recounts Khrushchevs 1959 trip across America against the backdrop of the Cold War and a capitalist America living under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb.;K Blows Top is the hilarious true story of a stranger in a strange land. The stranger was Nikita Khrushchev, the fat-bellied, thin-skinned, funny, cranky premier of the Soviet Union. The strange land was America in the 50s, a world of tail fins, movie stars, missile silos, and duck-and-cover drills. Khrushchevs bizarre 1959 trip across America was, as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it, a surreal extravaganza. For two weeks at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev traveled from coast to coast, scaring some Americans and amusing others. K--As the headline writers called him -- shadowboxed with Nelson Rockefeller, insulted Richard Nixon, irked Ike, impressed Elizabeth Taylor, grossed out Marilyn Monroe, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He also told jokes, threatened atomic war, shocked the United Nations, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in an Iowa home economics class, and blew the minds of the reporters who chronicled his every move. Khrushchevs journey was a glorious farce but the humor was darkened by the shadow of the atomic bomb. As he kept reminding people with his comic tantrums and grisly jokes, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America. In this delightful romp through Cold War America, Peter Carlson re-creates a darkly comic history that reads like of Vonnegut novel. - Jacket flap.