{"product_id":"koba-the-dread","title":"Koba The Dread","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eKoba the Dread\u003c\/i\u003e is the successor to Amis''s celebrated memoir, \u003ci\u003eExperience\u003c\/i\u003e. 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Great Terror\u003c\/i\u003e was second only to Solzhenitsyn''s \u003ci\u003eThe Gulag Archipelago\u003c\/i\u003e in undermining the USSR. Amis''s remarkable memoir explores these connections. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere ''statistic''.  \u003ci\u003eKoba the Dread\u003c\/i\u003e, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin''s aphorism.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57320219509118,"sku":"NW9780099438021","price":13.95,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9780099438021.jpg?v=1778240460","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/en-eu\/products\/koba-the-dread","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}