Name: The Fish That Ate the Whale
ISBN: 9780374299279

Rich Cohen

The author of Sweet and Low presents a historical profile of Samuel Zemurray that traces his rise from a penniless youth to one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men, offering insight into his capitalist talents and the ways in which his life reflected the best and worst of American business dealings.

The Life and Times of America's Banana King

The Fish That Ate the Whale

Piet Terheyden

Patrick Book

An incredible human story that's also one of the most interesting business stories I've read.

Timeo Williams

Great book that gave readers a history lesson as well, detailing the life of a man with quite the history, but whose name most do not know.

Samuel Zemurray was his name. He came to the U.S as an immigrant and penniless. HE left with a fortune. The book details the good and the bad of his life. 

"His personality- personality and style being the great unaccounted factors in history. To colleagues like Frank Brogan who knew Zemurray, his motivation was clear: he wanted to win. And do whatever it took. Here was a self-made man, filled with the most dangerous kind of confidence: he had done it before and believed he could do it again. "(113)

The book also detailed a bit about CIA takeovers and how Zemurray's model paved the way. Also interesting, was his hire of Edward Bernays, a marketing genius, whose book: Crystallizing Public Opinion, was a favorite book of Joseph Goebbels. 

Favorite quote from book:
" I can't help but feel, after all the talk of America's decline, that we would do well by emulating Sam Zemurray-not the brutality or the conquest, but the righteous anger that sent the striver into the boardroom of laughing elites, waving his proxies, shouting, :You gentlemen have been fucking up this business long enough. I'm going to straighten it out."(242)

Willie Richter

Levi B

Whether you know him as El Amigo, the Banana Man, the Gringo, or simply Z - whether you even know him at all - Sam Zemurray lived one of the greatest untold American stories of the last hundred years. A tough, uneducated Russian Jew who found himself and his fortune in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Zemurray built a fruit-selling empire hustling rotting fruit to market to eke out the slimmest profit, to eventually become a backchannel kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary. The Fish That Ate the Whale spans the transition from Old-World business to New-: from privateer adventurers seeking fortunes in remote frontiers, to buccaneers of high finance and wars fought with media, no-bid contracts, and necessary illusions. Part of what makes this book so remarkable - and its dubious hero so compelling - is the almost invisible ease with which Cohen's threads intertwine to create a larger pattern that seems so obvious once you step back to see it. Z's story spans the birth of modern foreign relations, the creation of the CIA, smuggling dispossessed Jews out of Europe, the invention of Israel, corporate espionage, the Bay of Pigs, political assassination, and the unspoken motives of the Cold War. It is a twentieth-century epic, and standing at its core is a man unlike any we've seen before or since, who, for good or ill, looked at what was, but saw only what was possible.

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

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