Bananas!: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman

The New York Times - Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

…breezy but insightful history of the company, "more powerful than many nation states…a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom." United Fruit essentially invented not only "the concept and reality of the banana republic," but also, as Chapman shows, the concept and reality of the modern banana…[a] witty, energetic narrative…

Publishers Weekly

With its vast banana plantations and control of railroads and even national treasuries, the Boston-based United Fruit-known as El Pulpo, the Octopus-made the Central American countries whose economies it dominated into archetypical "banana republics." This jaundiced history briskly recaps the firm's misdeeds, including its bribery and political strong-arming, its calling in of Colombian troops who machine-gunned hundreds of strikers in 1928, its prominent role in overthrowing governments in Honduras in 1911 and Guatemala in 1954, and its fostering of a disease-prone banana monoculture that ravaged tropical landscapes. Financial Timeswriter Chapman interprets the company-with its monopolies, its union busting, its marketing campaigns to get housewives to approve bananas as between-meals snacks, its treatment of whole nations as disposable assets-as the forerunner of today's rapacious multinationals. But in making the now-defunct United Fruit the wellspring of capitalism's sins, the author insinuates more than he shows. He vaguely ties the company, with tenuous threads of inspiration rather than specific actions, to everything from Watergate to the Iraq War, and toys with the notion that it had a hand in the J.F.K. assassination. When Chapman sticks to United Fruit's real, rather than spiritual, influence, he offers a compelling cautionary tale of the evils of overmighty corporations and untrammeled globalization. (Feb.)

Lucy Heckman - Library Journal

Journalist and author Chapman (Jungle Capitalists) skillfully narrates this fascinating account of the rise and fall of the United Fruit Company, an early U.S. multinational corporation as influential as it was controversial. The diverse array of characters involved in this history includes Theodore Roosevelt, O. Henry, Carmen Miranda, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Fidel Castro, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chapman opens the story with Eli Black, the United Fruit Company's last CEO, throwing himself from the 44th floor of New York's Pan American building. He then relates the company's history since its founding in the late 19th century and traces the history of its chief product, the banana, adeptly weaving in the business, political, and cultural background. One of the book's many interesting features is its account of Samuel Zemurray, a complex character who charted United Fruit's course for several decades, beginning in the 1930s. The company now exists within Chiquita Brands International. Chapman's history should appeal not only to business readers but to those interested in the company's context within the broader history of the last century. All in all, a first-rate book; highly recommended for all libraries.

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Product Details

• ISBN: 1841958816
  
• ISBN-13: 9781841958811
• Format: Hardcover, 224pp
• Publisher: Canongate U.S.
• Pub. Date: January 2008
• Sales Rank: 9,074

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents