Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
Get it for less!
1 buyer waiting!
- or -
Don't have one? We'll set one up for you. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis
see larger photo List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $17.47
You Save: $7.48 (30%)
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $49. See details.
Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours
Edition: Hardcover
See more product details
Great Buy
Buy this book with Prague today!
Total List Price: $49.90
Buy Together Today: $34.94
Customers who bought this book also bought:
Fury: A Novel by Salman Rushdie Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
Explore similar items
Product Details
Hardcover: 192 pages ; Dimensions (in
inches): 1.10 x 7.79 x 5.77 Publisher: Talk Miramax Books; ISBN: 0786868767; (July 17, 2002) Amazon.com Sales Rank: 2,296
What's Your Advice?
What happened to the What's Your Advice feature? Find out.
Editorial Reviews
>From Publishers Weekly
Everyone knows what the Holocaust was, but, Amis points out, there is
no name for and comparatively little public awareness of the killing
that took place in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1933, when 20
million died under a Bolshevik regime that ruled as if waging war
against its own people. Why? The U.S.S.R. was effectively a gigantic
prison system that was very good at keeping its grisly secrets. Too,
communism had widespread support in the rest of the world, as Amis
reminds us. Not quite a memoir, this book sandwiches a lengthy
treatise on the horror of life in Leninist and Stalinist Russia
between Amis's brief personal takes on his gradually dawning awareness
of Soviet atrocities. In his first and final pages, he deals with
three generations of dupes who supported Soviet rule: that of H.G.
Wells and George Bernard Shaw; that of novelist Kingsley Amis, the
writer's father and member of the Communist Party in the 1940s; and
that of leftist contemporaries of Martin Amis himself, notably the
writer Christopher Hitchens. Throughout, Amis snipes at Hitchens in
particular ( What about the famine?' I once asked him. There wasn't a
famine,' he said, smiling slightly and lowering his gaze. There may
have been occasional shortages....' ) Alexander Solzhenitsyn tried to
tell the West about Stalinism in the '70s, but this grim patriarch had
no appeal for the New Left, a generation interested only in revolution
as play, Amis says. Most readers won't be interested in the author's
private quarrels, but in the bulk of the book he relates passionately
a story that needs to be told, the history of a regime that murdered
its own people in order to build a better future for them.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
>From Booklist
This highly regarded British novelist follows his memoir Experience
(2000) with another nonfiction book that, loosely defined, may also be
called a memoir, and it is absolutely riveting. Amis is the son of
novelist Kingsley Amis, and Amis fils recalls his father's affiliation
with communism in the 1930s and, along with his "Oxford comrades,"
their ignorance of Stalin's "domestic cataclysms," namely the Soviet
dictator's massacre of anyone who could possibly be thought to be a
dissident--the...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0786868767/
reviews/102-8258196-9884935#07868687675123