The Fish that Ate the Whale, Rich Cohen
The Fish that Ate the Whale, Rich Cohen
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

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

Author: Rich Cohen

Narrator: Robertson Dean

Unabridged: 9 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/31/2012

Synopsis

When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America in 1891, he was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine 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.

About Rich Cohen

Rich Cohen is the New York Times-bestselling author of Tough Jews, Monsters, Sweet and Low, The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, The Chicago Cubs, and The Last Pirate of New York, and, with Jerry Weintraub, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. He is the cocreator of the HBO series Vinyl, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a writer at large for Air Mail. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. Cohen has won the Great Lakes Book Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on June 02, 2019

Scattered both internationally and thematically, this book is a bit of a rambler. Banana republics, foreign cowboys, embezzlement, monopolies, men of action, and the Latin American nightmare unfold alongside "a parable of the American dream—not history as it is recorded in textbooks, but the authenti......more

Goodreads review by Oleksandr on August 25, 2021

This is a biography of Samuel Zemurray, the banana king. Born in Bessarabia (now Moldova, in 1877 when he was born – the Russian Empire, taken from Ottomans in the 1850s), he emigrated to the US in 1891, started trading ripe bananas, thrown of by then the monopoly United Fruit is 1905, set a new gov......more

Goodreads review by Mal on July 26, 2023

Chances are, you’ve never heard of the guy who was famously called America’s Banana King. But if you’re not aware of some of the things he’s done, you’ll never be a big winner on Jeopardy or pass an AP test in modern world history. Just for example, he was the guy who engineered the CIA-led coup tha......more

Goodreads review by Swati on May 21, 2020

The Fish That Ate the Whale took me all the way from the busy docks of New Orleans to the sultry groves of Honduras, and elsewhere, across the world. Everywhere that the towering (literally) figure of Sam Zemurray had set foot. This is a fascinating read. However, it's less about the life and more a......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List