Book Review: The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King

Abstract

Rich Cohen The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 270 pp.The Fish That Ate the Whale's preface concludes, you want to understand the spirit of our nation, the good and the bad, you can enroll in college, sign up for classes, take notes and pay tuition, or you can study the life of Sam the Banana Man (p. xiii). Rich Cohen's biography of Samuel (the Banana Man) Zemurray, a Russian who immigrated to America penniless in 1891 and amassed personal and corporate wealth over five decades in the corporate fruit business, blends literary journalism with historical analysis. While Zemurray's story is markedly different from college courses, Cohen's illuminates the good and the bad of being successful, something educators should be teaching public relations students.While informative, textbooks can be forgettable and costly; a well-researched popular biography, especially if its stories relate well to a course, can be compelling, memorable, and affordable content. A bonus for biographies is their transferability to professional networking and job interviews. Few textbooks yield the popular attention Cohen has garnered with National Public Radio, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian Magazine, so students can gain some cultural literacy from a book they just read as they socialize professionally.The Banana Man's plucky entrepreneurial spirit is engaging. He starts in New Orleans purchasing discarded ripe bananas. If ripes had spots, they would spoil before they reached consumers across America, so Zemurray found closer markets for the ripe fruit, making deals and selling his just-in-time supply at train stations. Green, yellow, ripe, and brown are the book's section titles, and these stages in the banana's product lifecycle coincide with Zemurray's own life from young financial success to supposed regretful millionaire. Cohen's treatment of the story is more a Hollywood production than mundane history.The tall and shadowy Zemurray is watched by the FBI as he appears in the dark streets of 1910 New Orleans poised to coordinate a regime change in Honduras that will defend his banana trade despite the wishes of the U.S. State Department.Zemurray's life mirrors Cohen's setting of America as a land of opportunity where corporations frequently bully the system both to keep the opportunity flowing their way and to protect profits even at the cost of human capital. For Zemurray and for United Fruit, bullying was gunboat diplomacy, synonymous with U.S. policy in Central America. We also learn of tragic indiscretions like Los Pericos (the Parakeets), banana workers who turned blue when covered by the poison (copper sulfate and lime powder) applied to bananas to prevent disease on Central American plantations. Cohen explains, Over time, these workers began to experience certain abnormalities. They lost their olfactory senses and their appetite (p. 149).Zemurray's personal papers were unavailable because he kept no records of business dealings. Cohen had conversations with third parties who knew and worked with Zemurray at United Fruit and drew on source materials, such as newspaper accounts and scholarly histories related to banana republics. …