#37 The Fish That Ate The Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

What I learned from reading The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen. --- When he arrived in America in 1891 at age fourteen, Zemurray 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, a banana hauler, a dockside hustler, and the owner of plantations on the Central American isthmus. He batted and conquered United Fruit, which was one of the first truly global corporations. [0:01] Zemurray’s life is a parable of the American dream. It told me that the life of the nation was not written only by speech-making grandees in funny hats but also by street-corner boys, immigrant strivers, crazed and driven, some with one good idea, some with thousands, willing to go to the ends of the earth to make their vision real. [0:31] How Sam Zemurray started: He’d arrived on the docks at the start of the last century with nothing. In the early years, he’d had to make his way in the lowest precincts of the fruit business, peddling ripes, bananas other traders dumped into the sea. He worked like a dog and defied the most powerful people in the country. [2:26]  He was driven by the same raw energy that has always attracted the most ambitious to America. You did not need to be a Rockefeller to know the basics of the dream: Start at the bottom, fight your way to the top. [3:35]  He believed in staying close to the action—in the fields with the workers, in the dives with the banana cowboys. You drink with a man, you learn what he knows. There is no problem you can’t solve if you understand your business from A to Z. [4:33]  His real life began when he saw that first banana. He devised a plan soon after: he would travel to where the fruit boats arrived from Central America, purchase a supply of his own, carry them back to Selma, and go into business. [6:24] See opportunity where others see not