Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

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Description

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 vital 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 most likely the most efficient one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The writer’s father, Kingsley Amis, although later reactionary in tendency, used to be a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, after which his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), used to be Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, used to be second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the united states. The present memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person used to be tragic, the death of 1,000,000 a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, right through whose course the writer absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.

From the Hardcover edition.

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