K Blows Top

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the U.S. in 1959, following a visit to Russia by then-Vice President Richard Nixon. K, as the headlines called him at the time, personified the evil threat of Communism to Americans. His visit provoked thousands of newspaper articles on the trip, and they form the basis of this entertaining and informative story about "inviting the enemy into our camp." Both the humorous and explosive sides of the Russian leader's personality give narrator Malcolm Hillgartner ample material for his clever impersonation and faux accent. A studied parody of Nixon's unmistakable muttering chimes in here and there as well. Hillgartner's appropriate humor and announcer's voice act like a tour guide to American life and politics during the Cold War of the 1950s. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

April 6, 2009
Although Punch
magazine famously commented on the humor of Nikita Khrushchev’s desire to visit Disneyland during his 1959 trip to America, Carlson a former writer for the Washington Post
, can still mine the tour with hilarious results, due in equal parts to Khrushchev’s outsized provocateur personality and the bizarre and thoroughly American reaction to his visit. Numerous secondary players provide comic support: then vice president Richard Nixon’s fixations on mano a mano debates with the quicksilver premier; Boston Brahmin and U.N. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Khrushchev’s tour guide, who dutifully filed daily analysis of Khrushchev’s public tantrums; popular gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who in a noteworthy example of bad taste attacked Mrs. Khrushchev’s attire. A host of other American icons also make appearances: among them Herbert Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra. Although Carlson’s focuses on the comic, there are insights into Khrushchev’s personality, many provided by his son Sergei, now a respected professor at Brown University, illuminating the method in Khrushchev’s madness. All in all, in Carson’s hands the cold war is a surprisingly laughing matter.