Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million 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.Koba the Dread captur
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| Title | : | Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.86 (925 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1400032202 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2003-09-09 |
| Genre | : |
Editorial : From Publishers Weekly Everyone knows what the Holocaust was, but, Amis points out, there is no name for and comparatively little public awareness of the killing that took place in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1933, when 20 million died under a Bolshevik regime that ruled as if waging war against its own people. Why? The U.S.S.R. was effectively a gigantic prison system that was very good at keeping its grisly secrets. Too, communism had widespread support in the rest of the world, as Amis reminds us. Not quite a memoir, this book sandwiches a lengthy treatise on the horror of life in Leninist and Stalinist Russia between Amis's brief personal takes on his gradually dawning awareness of Soviet atrocities. In his first and final pages, he deals with three generations of dupes who supported Soviet rule: that of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw; that of novelist Kingsley Amis, the writer's father and member of the Communist Party in the 1940s; and that of leftist contemporaries of
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,
Most important, the side characters are as interesting and fun to learn as the main characters. I trust this series is not finished but this installment has done very little to keep it up front in the must read position. The reason it does not get a five star rating is that the author did not seem to be able to give the main character a lot of depth until a quarter of the way in the book. Also, it only gives some of the answers, which is frustrating if you are having trouble figuring out a problem. I'm a fan of Lucius Shephard and have not read enough of his stuff. I have thoroughly enjoyed each one of her books and I can not wait for the next one.. Lots of new words appear in this book -- her family was "pooristic" for example. Torque listed is different (way higher 19ft.lbs VS 14 for spark plugs) from one specified in factory repair manual. The author stresses the importance of eating well, drinking plenty of water, and getting enough exercise and sleep.
This chic book offers pr
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