Koba the Dread - Laughter and the Twenty Million (Paperback, Vintage Intl)

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

Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — 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 author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (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 Solzhenitsyn’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 “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.


From the Hardcover edition.

General

Imprint:	Vintage Books
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Vintage International
Release date:	September 2003
First published:	September 2003
Authors:	Martin Amis
Dimensions:	203 x 133 x 22mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	336
Edition:	Vintage Intl
ISBN-13:	978-1-4000-3220-4
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Historical, political & military Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction Books > Humanities > History > European history > General Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > General Books > History > European history > General Books > History > World history > From 1900 > General Books > Biography > Historical, political & military
LSN:	1-4000-3220-2
Barcode:	9781400032204

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!