The Life and Times of Americas Banana King Free

FREE THE FISH THAT ATE THE WHALE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AMERICAS BANANA KING PDF

Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times-Picayune The fascinating untold tale of Samuel Zemurray, the self-made banana mogul who went from penniless roadside banana peddler to kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America inhe was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. Working his way up from a roadside fruit peddler to conquering the United Fruit Company, Zemurray became a symbol of the best and worst of the United States: proof that America is the land of opportunity, but also a classic example of the corporate pirate who treats foreign nations as the backdrop for his adventures. Zemurray lived one of The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King great untold stories of the last hundred years. Starting with nothing but a cart of freckled bananas, he built a sprawling empire of banana cowboys, mercenary soldiers, Honduran peasants, CIA agents, and American statesmen. From hustling on the docks of New Orleans to overthrowing Central American governments and precipitating the bloody thirty-six-year Guatemalan civil war, the Banana Man lived a monumental and sometimes dastardly life. Rich Cohen's brilliant historical profile The Fish That Ate the Whale unveils Zemurray as a hidden power broker, driven by an indomitable will to succeed. I loved this book. Ineresting words tzedakah, shtanker, and goyim. June Great book! Samuel Zemurray is bigger than life, he was a quiet Jewish John Wayne from the Russian steppes who orchestrated coups, toppling nations and corporations. He was the last of a generation that "Never complain, Never explain. He was the fish that swallowed the whale. His life would make an epic movie on the scale of Citizen Kane or Howard Hughes, but even more adventuresome since it involved armed revolutions and private jungle fiefdoms. It's The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King how little known Zemurray The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King, yet he had an outsize impact on the history of Central America, New Orleans and Israel. Cohen is a great writer a real pleasure to read. He was born in and came to America in at the age of When he arrived, he had nothing. When he died he had lived a life that took him to the very pinnacle of success and back down again to the bottom. At one time, he was one of the richest and most powerful men. He had influence with both the leaders of the United States and the leaders of foreign countries. His influence over the Latin American banana business was monumental. His influence over Latin America was widespread. He got the idea for his banana business one night, while walking in New Orleans. As he describes the street he was standing on, it sounded like he could also have been on the Reeperbahn, in Hamburg Germany's red light district of yore. From the moment he witnessed the sight of this magical fruit, called the banana, which has no growing season and produces fruit all year long, his life's map was drawn. El Amigo was born. The Banana King's history had begun in earnest. From the head of his successfully run business Cuyamel, he morphed into the man who controlled the largest banana business in the world, United Fruit. His story includes the tragic history of the 20thcentury with the Depression and the Holocaust influencing many of his decisions. When the dream of a Jewish state was realized, it was with his help. He was influential in persuading many Latin American heads of state to agree to the creation of the Jewish state, and so he helped birth the state of Israel. Although as a Jew, he was not deeply rooted in the practice of Judaism, he was rooted in the idea of being a Jew. He had a hand in many events of the world, and in some ways, he was an unsung hero but on the opposite side he was an unsung villain. His business practices and influences on governments were often brutal with disastrous consequences. When he wanted something, Zemurrary got it. He used legal and illegal, moral and immoral means The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King attain whatever he wanted. He dealt with the heads of multiple governments, not only his own, he made bargains with a heavy hand, was influential in overthrowing governments, most notably Honduras and Guatemala, one in defiance of the United States and one working in unison with them. The names he was involved with are famous. He dealt with J. Morgan, Hunt, Pierrepont, Roosevelt and many other government and banking names that live on today. On the other side he was also involved with men who were tyrants or revolutionaries, like Che Guevara, Christmas, Castro and Chavez, among others. His name was often synonymous with revolutions as well as commerce. He witnessed the birth of the banana business and the death of his influence in it. His life, like the business, ended on a downward trend, but his rise makes quite a story. Here at Walmart. Your email address will never be sold or distributed to a third party for any reason. Sorry, but we can't respond to individual comments. If you need immediate assistance, please contact Customer Care. Your feedback helps us make Walmart shopping better for millions of customers. Recent searches Clear All. Enter Location. Update location. Learn more. Report incorrect product information. Rich Cohen. Walmart Book Format. Select Option. Current selection is: Paperback. Free 2- day delivery. Pickup not available. Add to list. Add to registry. About This Item. 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T he banana has to be the most absurd and obscene of fruits — though in fact it's not officially a fruit but a herbaceous plant. After you've unzipped one, what do you do with those sad, limp strips of skin? It is always banana peel that causes ludicrous falls, never apple cores or cherry stones. And then, having bared the pulpy prong, how can you consume it without blushing? In the early 20th century, only loose women dared to eat bananas in a public place. Nowadays, the banana has become banal. Boringly available all year, it looks and tastes standardised, and could almost be the result of mass production in a factory: since it duplicates itself through rhizomes rather than scattering seeds, it is, as Rich Cohen points out, always and everywhere the same, like Coca-Cola or Heinz baked beans. The history of the banana business, however, has its sensational side, dabbling in assassination, revolution and the skulduggery of international finance. The countries where the plants grew may, as American importers scornfully said, have been "banana republics", but they all bowed down to the man they nicknamed the Banana King — the cranky, ruthless Sam Zemurraythe subject of Cohen's biography, who as president of United Fruit made his company "as ubiquitous as Google and as feared as Halliburton", rapaciously representing the US in those equatorial latitudes that Pablo Nerudain a poem attacking The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King banana trade, called "America's sweet waist". Zemurray had what Cohen considers to be an allegorical American life. He arrived in New York from Moldavia in at the age of 14, uneducated and penniless. Before long he was grubbing together a small fortune by rescuing metal scraps from dumps and selling them; expert at making waste turn a profit, he bought up bruised bananas in the Alabama port of Mobile and with the help of train drivers and telegraph operators sped them to inland grocers before they blackened. The result was a commercial empire, based in New Orleans, which came to control the political destiny of those benighted republics below the American belt and made Zemurray a sly, unlicensed agent of Washington DC's The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King policy. His plantations were situated in areas of insurgency, described by Che Guevara as "dominions of United Fruit". He therefore helped engineer an uprising in Honduras, and allowed the CIA to use his banana boats for gun-running. Cohen also suspects him of covert involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Back in Louisiana, he was briefly inconvenienced by the populist campaign of governor Huey Long ; when Long was killed, Zemurray may have quietly smirked. Those who refused his offers often The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King up dead. He was, as Cohen puts it in another jocularly epic tag, a "Don Corleone of the isthmus". Zemurray began as a piratical privateer, but ended as a fixer in a new world carved up between global corporations. Wealth gave him power, and he struggled and fumbled as he tried, like the newly imperial US, to use it righteously. On the face of it, he was as unlovable as any other capitalist bogey, but Cohen nurtures a sneaking regard for the man, mainly because his success was achieved at the cost of the snooty Wasps who despised Jews, Catholics and the rest of the huddled ethnic masses. Imagining Zemurray's thick accent, Cohen says he must have had "the Yiddish-inflected voice of our grandparents, the fruit pedlars, the street hagglers". They're not my ancestors, but I found the story riveting, mainly because of the mischievous ease with which Cohen tells it. He has done his research, but he's no prissy, footnote-addled academic. Who cares? Beneath the comedy, Cohen is a cosmic nihilist, for whom "the world is a succession of fortunes made and lost, lessons learned and forgotten", so in the end nothing much matters. Documentary veracity counts for less than the dashing energy of Cohen's characterisation, and the moody atmosphere of the landscapes in which he sets this buccaneering life — New Orleans with its malarial damp, the jungle in Panama where an incomplete, unbuildable highway is "defeated by nature and walks away muttering". Best of all is his horrified contemplation of the monstrous banana in its native habitat, with its leaves shaped like elephant ears and "coiled like a roll of dollar bills". After a tropical downpour you can hear the plants stealthily growing at the rate of an inch an hour as the foliage drips: it is the sound of money being made. The Observer Biography books. A colourful account of the rise to wealth and power of Sam Zemurray, America's great fruit tycoon, makes entertaining reading. Peter Conrad.

Account Options Sign in. Top charts. New arrivals. Switch to the audiobook. Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times-Picayune The fascinating untold tale of Samuel Zemurray, the self-made banana mogul who went The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King penniless roadside banana peddler to kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America inhe was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. Working his way up from a roadside fruit peddler to conquering the United Fruit Company, Zemurray became a symbol of the best and worst of the United States: proof that America is the land of opportunity, but also a classic example of the corporate pirate who treats foreign nations as the backdrop for his adventures. Zemurray lived one of the great untold stories of the last hundred years. Starting with nothing but a cart of freckled bananas, he built a sprawling empire of banana cowboys, mercenary soldiers, Honduran peasants, CIA agents, and American statesmen. From hustling on the docks of New Orleans to overthrowing Central American governments and precipitating the bloody thirty-six-year Guatemalan civil war, the Banana Man lived a monumental and sometimes dastardly life. Rich Cohen's brilliant historical profile The Fish That Ate the Whale unveils Zemurray as a hidden power broker, driven by an indomitable will to succeed. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, three sons, and dog. Reviews Review Policy. Published The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of Americas Banana King. Flowing text, Original pages. Best for. Web, Tablet, Phone, eReader. Content protection. Read aloud. Learn more. Flag as inappropriate. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.