Bananas
How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World
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4.3 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A lively and insightful cultural history of the coveted yellow fruit, as well as a gripping narrative about the infamous rise and fall of the United Fruit Company.
In this compelling history of the United Fruit Company, Financial Times writer Peter Chapman weaves a dramatic tale of big business, deceit, and violence, exploring the origins of arguably one of the most controversial global corporations ever, and the ways in which their pioneering example set the precedent for the institutionalized greed of today’s multinational companies.
The story has its source in United Fruit’s nineteenth-century beginnings in the jungles of Costa Rica. What follows is a damning examination of the company’s policies: from the marketing of the banana as the first fast food, to the company’s involvement in an invasion of Honduras, a massacre in Colombia, and a bloody coup in Guatemala. Along the way the company fostered covert links with US power brokers such as Richard Nixon and CIA operative Howard Hunt, manipulated the press, and stoked the revolutionary ire of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.
From the exploited banana republics of Central America to the concrete jungle of New York City, Peter Chapman’s Bananas “make[s] us realise what a long and complex moral journey even something as seemingly innocent as a banana has made to our fruit bowls” (The Guardian).
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 Times writer 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.
Customer Reviews
Funny book, seriously bananas
Nice little read about bananas,the us govt and corporations plus Banana Republics. Prose is a little flip but readable.