The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King
“A book about Sam Zemurray, who was the banana king. Another interesting book you might like.”
Why it is worth your time
The Fish That Ate the Whale is Rich Cohen's 2012 biography of Sam Zemurray, the Russian-born immigrant who arrived in Alabama in 1891, started by selling bananas too ripe for the big companies to ship, and built Cuyamel Fruit into a rival of United Fruit. He sold to United Fruit in 1930, then took control of the larger company in 1933. Cohen, a writer for Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, covers the 1911 Honduras coup Zemurray financed and the company's role in the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's government. Jason recommended it on the podcast in September 2020 and ran it in his TWiST book club that June. Zemurray is the kind of self-made outsider he returns to. It suits readers who like business biography with political history attached. The caveat is that Bookforum's Rachel Nolan found Cohen exults over Zemurray's success while glossing over how he achieved it, treating Latin American sovereignty as a nasty little inconvenience.
