audiobook Journal Of The American Oriental Society; Volume 28; Issue 2 by American Oriental Society in History

Description

A brilliant weave of personal involvement; vivid biography and political insight; Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir; Experience.Koba the Dread 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.The 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; The Great Terror; was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic; the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread; during whose course the author absorbs a particular; a familial death; is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.From the Hardcover edition.