Koba The Dread

p>i>Koba the Dread/i> is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, i>Experience/i>. 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. br>br>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 i>The Great Terror/i> was second only to Solzhenitsyn's i>The Gulag Archipelago/i> in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. br>br>Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. i>Koba the Dread/i>, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism./p> p>i>Koba the Dread/i> is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, i>Experience/i>. 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. br>br>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 i>The Great Terror/i> was second only to Solzhenitsyn's i>The Gulag Archipelago/i> in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. br>br>Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. i>Koba the Dread/i>, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism./p>