Before Facebook, before Google, another corporate behemoth controlled the lands, livelihoods, and lives of much of the Western Hemisphere. Chapman engagingly chronicles the rise and fall of the United Fruit Company, whose very existence was centered on a single, proletarian, often comical fruit: the banana. — Mike Hare
Description
In this compelling history, Peter Chapman shows how the United Fruit Company took bananas from the jungles of Costa Rica to the halls of power in Washington, D.C., with not just clever marketing, but covert CIA operations, bloody coups and brutalised workforces. And how along the way they turned the banana into a blueprint for a new model of unfettered global capitalism: one that serves corporate power at any cost.
About the Author
Peter Chapman is a journalist and writer, and a former BBC foreign correspondent in South America. He works for the Financial Times as an editor and writer, and lives in London.
