Koba The Dread: Laughter And The Twenty Million

'Koba The Dread' is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, 'Experience'. It is largely political (while remaining personal). It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, losif 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, a leading Sovietologist, whose book of 1968, 'The Great Terror', was second only to Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago' in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of millions a mere statistic. 'Koba The Dread', during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism. Review: 'Indignant, angry, personal and strangely touching...Koba the dread carries a punch, artfully delivered' New York Times Author Biography: Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories and five collections of non-fiction. His memoir, Experience, was published by Vintage in 2001.