{"product_id":"9781400032204","title":"Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million","description":"\u003cp\u003eA brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, \u003ci\u003eKoba the Dread\u003c\/i\u003e is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, \u003ci\u003eExperience\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eKoba the Dread\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Great Terror\u003c\/i\u003e, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s \u003ci\u003eThe Gulag Archipelago\u003c\/i\u003e in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” \u003ci\u003eKoba the Dread\u003c\/i\u003e, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47040633667824,"sku":"9781400032204","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781400032204_p0.jpg?v=1763711549","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781400032204","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}