K blows top : a Cold War comic interlude starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's most unlikely tourist / Peter Carlson.

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

Prologue : K blows top -- Trip One : The heat in the kitchen. Dueling proverbs -- Arguing about animal dung -- Khrushchev takes the Pepsi challenge -- The kitchen debate -- Nixon gets zapped -- How many nukes does it take to wipe out England? -- The new party line on love -- Nixon gets drunk -- Khrushchev's coming! Khrushchev's coming! -- Trip Two : "A surreal extravaganza". The worst human being on earth -- What should K see? -- Shooting the moon -- K meets J. Edgar Hoover -- Fondling animals -- Khrushchev throws a tantrum -- Communism is like my wart -- The premier tells a Jewish joke -- The dentists fight back -- Stuck in an elevator -- Bronx cheers in New York -- Khrushchev fever sweeps Hollywood -- Nikita meets Marilyn -- Can-Can -- Khrushchev fakes a tantrum -- Barnstorming to San Francisco -- Mankind's face is more beautiful than its backside -- J. Edgar Hoover gets caught with his pants down -- A riot in the cathedral of capitalism -- A Cossack charge in Coon Rapids, Iowa -- Communist dictator in a home ec class -- Camp David -- Chasing butterflies -- The first to be shot -- Chihuahuas for Khrushchev -- Stormy applause -- Trip Three : The banging of the shoe. Spy in the sky -- Obligatory sex scene -- That son of a bitch, Richard Nixon -- Rendezvous with Fidel -- The guest who wouldn't leave -- Banging the shoe -- I feel vicious, malicious, and low! -- Epilogue : Life is a cosmic joke.

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.

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.