The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

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The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Rich Cohen (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator), Dreamscape Media, LLC (Publisher)

4.5 2,018 ratings

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When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America in 1891, he was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans 69 years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, banana hauler, dockside hustler, and plantation owner. He battled and conquered the United Fruit Company, becoming a symbol of the best and worst of the United States: proof 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. 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.

Listening Length

9 hours and 1 minute
Author

Rich Cohen
Narrator

Robertson Dean
Audible release date

August 1, 2012
Language

English
Publisher

Dreamscape Media, LLC
ASIN

B008ROR3TM
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	9 hours and 1 minute
Author	Rich Cohen
Narrator	Robertson Dean
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	August 01, 2012
Publisher	Dreamscape Media, LLC
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B008ROR3TM
Best Sellers Rank	#11,193 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #39 in Biographies of Business Leaders #96 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

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newbie critic

A great surprise read - much more than bananas

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2023

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I was skeptical when starting the Kindle sample. I love business bios, but who cares about bananas? What a great surprise, a book that keeps on giving, even when you think it's over. Each time you think Sam is out and done, there is more, and author Cohen finds another dimension to open. Aside from the colorful banana business history, there is New Orleans, central America, staged coups, CIA & J.F. Dulles, Bay of Pigs, American business history, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, the Israeli war of independence and more. It's a great American success story that parallels US influence and hubris around the globe.

Not to be overlooked is the author's first person writing style, with editorial comments and humorous quips. Rather than a dry narrative, he brings to life the fascinating subject (Sam) and how he approached the world. One of my most memorable non-fiction reads and highly recommended.

2 people found this helpful

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Bradley Bevers

5-Star Book, 3-Star Writing . . .

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2013

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As far as business biographies goes, this is one of the most fascinating and storied lives I have ever read about. Samuel Zemurray led a fascinating life, and the author covers much of the material well and presents it a very engaging way. Unfortunately, there are also some choices the author makes that detract from the book and the story of Zemurray's life, but not enough to warrant skipping it.

Sam Zemurray is accurately described by the author as a sort of quintessential American story. He was born in Russia, but moved to the United States when he was just fifteen years old. He knew that he wanted to be a businessman, and set off in search of a product. He fell in love with bananas, a brand new fruit to the United States, and started his business by buying the discards that no one else wanted. From there he built his small company into the second largest, best run banana company in the world. Bananas might not seem like much now, they certainly didn't to me, but the banana industry was one of the largest industries in his time, controlling governments, shipping channels, and entire continents. Sam himself had a hand in overthrowing governments, defying U.S. presidents, and using guerrilla warfare to grow his business. He eventually sold his business, retired, took over another business, resurrected the banana trade and saved it for years, helped Israel become a country once again, and much more. His life and his influence were unmatched in the South American world at the time, and he had a hand in almost everything. Fascinating story of someone who has been largely forgotten.

By itself, the book is a great read and highly recommended. But there are several times the author takes his style of writing and pushes the envelope too far. He hypothesizes too often about Sam's thoughts, references his other books, and inserts himself into the story in an annoying way. He's a gifted writer who has really condensed Zemurray's life down and made it a great read . . . but it what it is a great, highly recommendable book could have been even better.

Buy this book and read it, highly recommended.

3 people found this helpful

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T. Graczewski

“Get up first, work harder, get your hands in the dirt and the blood in your eyes”

Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2017

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I loved this book. In fact, Rich Cohen’s “The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King” just might make it into my non-fiction book Hall of Fame, an honored group of the best, most engaging pieces of history and biography that I’ve ever read.

Why such high praise? Well, mainly because “The Fish” delivered and succeeded on multiple dimensions.

First, I love learning about different industries and commodities, how they developed over time, often over millennia, shaping world markets and modern political economies (e.g. cotton, gold, salt, cod, petroleum). “The Fish” provides a fascinating introduction to the world of bananas, a fruit that every American today knows and most of whom love on their breakfast cereal or as a mid-day, nutritious snack. Only, as I learned, bananas aren’t actually a fruit and little more than a century ago they were far from common, but rather quite exotic, a true luxury, displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition to crowds of gawking onlookers as if it came from another planet. Indeed, according to the author, a banana in 1900 was as unusual to the average American as an African cucumber is today.

There’s a lot about the very familiar banana that I never knew. For instance, Cohen explains that the banana tree is actually the world’s largest herb, and thus its offspring, the banana, are technically berries. Even more fascinating, bananas grow from rhizomes, not seeds. In other words, cut appendages continue to grow, replicating the original. As Cohen describes it: “When you look at a banana, you’re looking at every banana, an infinite regression. There are no mutts, only the first fruit of a particular species and billions of copies. Every banana is a clone, in other words, a replica of an ur-banana that weighed on its stalk the first morning of man.”

Believe it or not, the story of the banana gets even crazier. If you’ve ever wondered why old black-and-white films joked about slipping on a banana peel even though the banana peel that you’ve long known doesn’t feel particularly slippery, that’s because we have completely different bananas today. In the early nineteenth century, Americans were introduced to the “Big Mike,” a variety of banana that went extinct in 1965. It was bigger, tastier and more robust than the bananas we have today, according to Cohen, and their peels were far more slippery. The bananas we eat today are known as “Cavendish,” their primary benefit being immunity to the Panama disease that wiped out the Big Mike. Again, because bananas are all exact genetic copies, they are highly susceptible to rapid eradication from disease.

Second, I’m a sucker for a great rags-to-riches story. The tale of Samuel Zemurray delivers that in spades. He arrived in America in 1891, a penniless Jew from what today is Moldova, and settled in the Deep South. (It may surprise many Americans but the South was far more hospitable to Jews for most our history. For instance, Jefferson Davis had two Jews in his Cabinet; Lincoln had none.) While still in his teens Zemurray recognized a business opportunity where other only saw trash: the ripe bananas that Boston Fruit discarded along the rail line in Mobile, Alabama before shipping off to Chicago and other northern metropolitan destinations. Zemurray was a natural entrepreneur; he had no particular affinity for bananas, it was just the opportunity at hand. “If he had settled in Chicago,” Cohen writes, “it would have been beef; if Pittsburgh, steel; if L.A., movies.” Zemurray quickly turned one man’s trash into cash, renting a boxcar to carry the castoff bananas along the slow rail route through the South, selling his cargo to local merchants at each Podunk rail stop until either his inventory ran out or spoiled. From such humble beginnings did a great international trading company eventually take root, Cuyamel Fruit, named after the river separating Honduras and Guatemala, the heartland of banana growing.

By 1925, Cuyamel Fruit Company, the creation of an upstart Jewish immigrant banana jobber, had emerged as a serious threat to United Fruit, the undisputed king of the industry, a company that was led by Boston’s best, the sons of Brahmins. The threat was not because of Cuyamel’s size. In most ways United Fruit still dominated its aggressive rival (i.e. United Fruit was harvesting 40 million bunches a year with 150,000 employees and working capital of $27m, compared to Cuyamel’s 8 million bunches, 10,000 employees and $3m in working capital). The threat was that Cuyamel was a better run business and more innovative, leading the way with selective pruning, drainage, silting, staking and overhead irrigation. “U.F. was a conglomerate, a collection of firms bought up and slapped together,” Cohen writes. Cuyamel, by contrast, was a well-oiled machine, vertically integrated and led from the front by Zemurray, the ultimate owner-manager-worker.

Cuyamel’s success was certainly no accident. It was the product of hard work, an obsessed owner-operator who understood his business at a visceral level, a skill earned over decades of hard, unglamorous work. Zemurray adhered to his own, classically American immigrant code of conduct: “get up first, work harder, get your hands in the dirt and the blood in your eyes.” Cohen describes his commitment and ultimate advantage this way: “Zemurray worked in the fields beside his engineers, planters, and machete men. He was deep in the muck, sweat covered, swinging a blade. He helped map the plantations, plant the rhizomes, clear the weeds, lay the track…unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow…By the time he was forty, he had served in every position from fruit jobber to boss. He worked on the docks, on the ships and railroads, in the fields and warehouses. He had ridden the mules. He had managed the fruit and money, the mercenaries and government men. He understood the meaning of every change in the weather, the significance of every date on the calendar.” Indeed, dedicated immigrants like Sam Zemurray have made America great. There’s nothing wrong with doing grunt work. In fact, it’s essential.

United Fruit bought out Cuyamel in the early days of the stock market crash of 1929, when the former had a market share of 54% to the latter’s 14%. United Fruit’s profit was some $45m and its stock price $108. By 1932, profit was down to $6m and the stock languished at $10.25. “The company was caught in a death spiral,” according to Cohen. By January 1933, Zemurray used his massive stake and proxy votes to take over the company, claiming “I realized that the greatest mistake the United Fruit management had made was to assume it could run its activities in many tropical countries from an office on the 10th floor of a Boston office building.” The immigrant with dirt under his nails and a rumbled jacket knew the business better than the Ivy Leaguers with manicures and pinstriped suits. Indeed, the fish (Cuyamel Fruit) was swallowing the whale (United Fruit). Zemurray would run the company until 1951, arguably the most successful years of its history. In 1950, the company cleared $66m in profit. By 1960, profits would fall to just $2m. United Fruit collapsed, eventually restructuring and reinventing itself as Chiquita Brands, based in Cincinnati.

When Zemurray started in the industry at the turn of the century, bananas were curiosities, a sidebar trade, something for the rich. By the time he retired, bananas were part of the daily American fabric, the interests of the industry consistent with that of political leadership in Washington. Indeed, some of the most illustrious and powerful men in government had close connections to United Fruit during the Zemurray era: CIA director Allen Dulles (member of the board of directors), secretary of state John Foster Dulles (U.F. legal counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell), New Deal fixer Tom Corcoran (paid lobbyist), UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge (large shareholder), among others. By the 1950s, Cohen writes, “it was hard to tell where the government ended and the company began.” At its height, Cohen says, United Fruit was “as ubiquitous as Google and as feared as Halliburton.”

For anyone interested in business history, American politics in Central America or the development of the global fruit industry, “The Fish that Ate the Whale” is a book to own and savor.

43 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Joseph Myren

AWESOME

Reviewed in Canada on December 15, 2023

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AWESOME

Chipolata

Very nice

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2024

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Great book.

MBI

Life and Times of a robber baron

Reviewed in India on January 16, 2019

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Provides inside view on lives and times of a robber baron. You start off cheering for the underdog - Russian Jewish immigrant Sam zemurray who found a opportunity in selling over ripe bananas and eventually took over the largest fruit company of the world. He fired the very WASP chairman of the board who was sneering at his accent with the zinger “You’re fired! Can you understand that, Mr. Chairman?”
Then shady stuff starts from funding and directing a coup in Honduras (against US government wishes) to manufacturing a communist threat in Guatemala (usual suspects like new york times involved) leading to a CIA led coup. There were unintended consequences like Che Guevara and Cuba and a wake of destruction left behind.
In later life, sam zemurray did a lot of good for both USA and the Central American countries - funding the Tulane University, professorship at Harvard, in central America - many hospitals, highways, power grids, seawalls, levees, orphanages and schools. Question is was it enough?

One person found this helpful

n.hiroshige

interesting

Reviewed in Japan on July 8, 2022

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He is a person of strong will. Interesting book.

Jean Boudillon

A great biography of a great man

Reviewed in France on November 27, 2016

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Rich Cohen surely is a master storyteller. The biography is fast-paced and the life of Sam Zemurray, The Banana Man, captivating. You will learn so much reading on his life—on business most importantly, but also history, Central America and geopolitics in the region.
The author makes a great job exposing the facts leaving you free to make your own opinion on the controversies.
I loved that book and came to love the man too.

Thanks Mr Cohen!

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