The Fish that Ate the Whale is a biography/story about a banana mogel at the time of massive industry titans around America. Sam “the banana man” Zemurray was a Eastern European Jewish Immagrant with no money living in America. He was looking for something to peddle and he saw someone unloading a boat full of bananas.

His first business adventure with bananas was spending most of his money on the unwanted bananas. Ripes were seen as trash to the merchants because they couldn’t sell them fast enough, so if they arrived ripe, they would toss them. Sam spent all the money he had to buy them and sell them himself.

“Sam grew fixated on ripes, recognizing a product others have only seen trash.”

Another quote from the book sums up how creative he was. He always looked for uncommon solutions. He knew his strengths and likewise, he knew his oppponents weaknesses. One great example was when he was competing in a land battle with United Fruit which was the monopoly of the banana industry at the time. They were about 10 times larger than Sam’s business in every metric you could count.

Sam and United Fruit were both buying as much land as they could because they realized it was a finite resource and sooner or later, there wouldn’t be any more left. There was one track of land that had two people claiming ownership of it:

When the mess of deads came to light, United Fruit did what big bureaucracy-heavy companies always do: hired lawyers and investigators to search every file for the identity of the true owner. This took months. In the meantime, Zemurray, meeting separately with each claimant, simply bought the land from them both. He bought it twice– paid a little more, yes, but if you factor in the cost of all those lawyers, probably still spent less than U.F. and came away with the prize.

Zemurray knew it didn’t matter that he only paid the rightful owner, it mattered that he became the rightful owner. That type of creative thinking is how he became one of the most powerful men in the world at that time. All because of some bananas.

Verdict:

Worth reading. It was more of a story, diving into different story lines to give a rough history of people/businesses before Zemurray was involved. That was interesting. I wish it talked more about his war with United Fruit because I think that part of his life was what made him so unique.