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Koba The Dread

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Koba The Dread
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Martin Amis
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:336
Dimensions(mm): Height 198,Width 129
Category/GenreBiographies: Historical, Political and Military
World history - from c 1900 to now
ISBN/Barcode 9780099438021
ClassificationsDewey:947.0841
Audience
Tertiary Education (US: College)
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Vintage Publishing
Imprint Vintage
Publication Date 4 September 2003
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. 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, Iosif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, was 'a Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and later in life his closest friend, was Robert Conquest, whose book 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 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.

Author Biography

Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time's Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. He lives in New York.

Reviews

A powerfully written, well-documented polemic reminding us of how 20 million humans were starved, murdered or totured to death by Uncle Joe * Daily Mail * More than any of his contemporaries, Amis writes things that you want to remember and repeat: he is original * New Statesman * Amis uses all the tricks of his well-mastered trade to make readable what is almost unreadable, indeed hardly bearable... A disturbing book...but a book I was very glad to have read * Financial Times * Martin Amis' book will not date...it is wise, witty and saturated with saeva indignatio, the only adequate response to tyranny * Literary Review * What's best about him is his style. He is never dull -- John Carey * Sunday Times *