Peter Carlson will be at Magers & Quinn Booksellers on Friday, July 24, at 7:30pm to discuss his new book K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist.

Khrushchev’s 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted–“a surreal extravaganza,” as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it. Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe.

Details about this and all our events are on our here.–David E