Book cover of K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist

Book description

Khrushchevs 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducteda surreal extravaganza, as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it. Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked K Blows Top as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is the best proof that history can also be simply fun and insanely comical. The ten days that Khrushchev spent traveling through the U.S. in 1959, visiting both Hollywood and the farm of President Eisenhower, who gave him a calf, show, as if in a snow globe, all the comedy and tragedy of Soviet-American relations: the mutual fascination, the great similarities of wanting to please the world and dominate space, and the great mistrust that both sides could never quite put aside. And yet, these ten crazy days invite us to dream and speculate what would have been…

From Susanne's list on Pre-Putin’s Soviet Russia.

If you love K Blows Top...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

Want books like K Blows Top?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like K Blows Top.

Browse books like K Blows Top

Book cover of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
Book cover of Lenin on the Train
Book cover of Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin

Share your top 3 reads of 2025!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,366

readers submitted
so far, will you?

📚 If you like K Blows Top, you might also like...

Book cover of Deadly Revenge

Deadly Revenge by Patricia Bradley,

Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…

Book cover of The Duty of Memory

The Duty of Memory by Vicki Olsen,

Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.

This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…

5 book lists we think you will like!