A thorough though occasionally murky business study.
Financial Times (London) journalist Chapman’s insider account of United Fruit as the template for the modern multinational company often gets mired in the minutiae of a century’s worth of dubious business practices.
Unlike Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World (2007), which examines the international dissemination of the banana and its genetic precariousness, Chapman focuses on the rise of the United Fruit Company as an experimental laboratory for capitalism throughout the hemisphere. Two brothers from Brooklyn, Henry and Minor Keith, seized on Costa Rica’s idea to build a railroad through the country by the early 1870s, although they had no idea how treacherous the malarial swamps would prove. Minor Keith bought up plantations in Colombia and Panama and eventually merged with Andrew Preston’s Boston Fruit Company in 1899, which was scrambling to meet the U.S. demand for bananas. As a monopoly, and with control of the railroad and labor, sweet deals were made with the compliant dictators of the countries involved. Russian-Jewish emigrant Sam Zemurray ran the company for the next 50 years, moving into Honduras. Coups in the so-called banana republics (a term first used by O. Henry in his 1904 novel Cabbages and Kings) such as Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua were staged by United Fruit hand-in-hand with U.S. government forces. Strikes against exploitative labor practices turned violent, such as the massacre in Santa Marta, Colombia, in 1928, immortalized by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Protecting American interests against incursions by the communists became the overriding concern, which drew in the CIA. Chapman links the company’s demise to the dark forces of Watergate and insurrections in Nicaragua and Grenada, among others, and demonstrates how today’s accepted business practices—including the use of propaganda (“public relations”), slave-like labor conditions, branding, packaging and political lobbying—originated with United Fruit.
A thorough though occasionally murky business study.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84195-881-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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