Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-314) and index.

Recounts Khrushchev's 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. Khrushchev's 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. Khrushchev's 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