Banana

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To be fair, I also want to point out that anti-GMO zealots can be useful in their incorrectness, since it seems reasonable that private enterprises engaged in genetic manipulation can be expected to engage in safety-be-damned corner-cutting in pursuit of the largest return for their shareholders, so should be watched over by as many people as possible with a heartfelt adversarial relationship to the process. Wow. This is a Feb 2019 update: I just read an article that confirms that the banana is at great risk. I thought the author of this book was trying to give a dramatic spin to his work, but apparently it’s all very serious! Here is the article: https://amp.ft.com/content/74fb67b8-2... Having read Bitter Fruit (which I highly recommend!), I knew the book would eventually get to United Fruit's involvement in the '54 Guatemalan coup. I was looking forward to learning more about Zemurray's role in the coup - did he help initiate the campaign? How much did he know? Instead, this part of the book was frustratingly confusing. It's not clear at all if Zemurray even played a role. The book doesn't clearly state that he retired as President from U.F. in 1951 (the coup was three years later). But '51 is when the propaganda campaign started - so was he involved or not? The book also briefly mentions Zemurray getting updates from Corcoran (his apparent go-between with the CIA), but doesn't mention in what capacity and during what time period. I'll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven't a choice. I go.

To most people, a banana is a banana: a simple yellow fruit. Americans eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined. In others parts of the world, bananas are what keep millions of people alive. But for all its ubiquity, the banana is surprisingly mysterious; nobody knows how bananas evolved or exactly where they originated. Rich cultural lore surrounds the fruit: In ancient translations of the Bible, the 'apple' consumed by Eve is actually a banana (it makes sense, doesn't it?). Entire Central American nations have been said to rise and fall over the banana. Mensen bezwijken niet onder omstandigheden en krachten van buitenaf, ze worden van binnenuit verslagen, dacht ik uit de grond van mijn hart Mikage Sakurai has lost her dearly beloved grandmother whom she had been living with, and she feels lost, alone and vulnerable. She’s now an orphan as there are no other relatives. The tide has gone out and she doesn’t know when or whether it will return. She knows she has to find a new apartment to live in but hesitates. So when a casual acquaintance, Yuichi Tanabe, who used to work part-time in her grandmother’s favourite flower shop, invites her to stay with him and his mother, Eriko, she agrees, especially when she sees the enormous sofa, which would be her bed, in the living room and finally the kitchen. She was a particular lover of kitchens.Instead, the words are short, sweet, and sharp, as each narrator falls upon their knife of grief and attempts to walk it off. Here, there is no sweeping away of the tragedy into a neat compartmentalization, a time to mourn and a time to thrive coexisting in carefully delineated measurements of a person's history. For how can the horror of a beloved one being taken away in such an unfairly abrupt and often nonsensical manner ever be reconciled, as if the matter could heal as cleanly as a broken bone knitting up in a predictable number of days? As if the evolution of coping with an overwhelming loss could be graphed for all affected, and therein calculate a formulaic equation specifically calibrated for speeding up the resolution as efficiently as possible. As if it was a lie that when it came down to it, one is alone and will always be alone with one's mind, and that is how the battle of mournful reconciliation must always be fought. Another: "Why do I love everything that has to do with kitchens so much?... a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul." Does anyone think like that? (And it doesn't answer the question anyway.) Kitchen es un libro de personajes rotos descritos con elegancia. Es un libro que habla de la muerte como lo que es, totalmente natural e irremediable. Morirán personas amadas de tu vida así como el río fluye, encontrarás con quien tomar un té después y buscarás la forma de que ese dolor desaparezca, o de hacerte creer que ha desaparecido.

Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko's was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed.In the end, Cohen offers this judgment of Sam Zemurray: “If he had questioned the workings of [the] machine [he had set in motion and tended so long], he would have been a great man, but he was not a great man; he was a complicated man blessed with great energy and ideas.” Jadi, Saudara-saudara sekalian, pohon pengetahuan yang terlarang di surga itu bukan pohon apel. Tapi pisang. Ulangi kata-kata saya, PI-SANG! Hanya karena kesalahan penerjemahan bibel saja membuat orang awam jadi mengira buah yang menggoda Hawa itu adalah buah apel. Chosen, constructed families feel warmer than many societal more acceptable constructs. The protagonist gets unhappy at her university and with her former, more conventional boyfriend, while her oddball roommates don't judge her, but support her in overcoming grief. Zemurray died in his palatial New Orleans home in 1961 at the age of 84. Today, many of his descendants remain involved in Central America, as anthropologists, art experts, and in other academic pursuits. Perhaps they did come to understand the workings of Sam’s machine even though he never did.

Zemurray was incensed and used every device at his disposal – the Central Intelligence Agency, the press, and even the “Father of Public Relations,” Edward Bernays – to undermine Guatemalan resistance efforts. The CIA targeted Arbenz with their "Operation Success" and by 1954 Arbenz was gone with nary a struggle. This is a story of self-made man, who affected the global history, especially in the USA and Latin America, and his influence was both good and bad. It is well-known that most LatAm authors, like Gabriel García Márquez in his famous One Hundred Years of Solitude, don’t like the US banana exporting companies, which came in the early 20th century, boosting hopes that the yoke of aristocratic families that ruled the Isthmus since conquistadors, will be replaced by Gringo banana men. While the latter added a bit of social mobility, they used their wealth to overthrow the aristocrats, becoming aristocrats themselves. Unlike the old families, the banana royalty had no roots in the region. Zemurray was one of these gringos, even if, after acquiring banana plantations, he, unlike most other banana business management, actually lived there. All this said, the handling of Eriko in the book is rather frustrating and almost lead me to abandon it. Eriko is trans, and Yoshimoto seems to constantly remind you ‘ she used to be a man’. Which is just uncool. Granted this was 1988 and was probably progressive at the time, though other novels have approached trans identity. If it was just at the beginning I wouldn’t be as bothered, but it is relentless. And this is about the character that is the emotional centerpiece of the novel. Yoichi frequently reminds Mikage of her dead name and the level of passing the women at the club have is remarked upon as if their most defining trait. Granted, the discourse we have now wasn’t around at the time, but it still seems worth mentioning as it will definitely offend some. Eriko being trans is passed off as she simply decided she didn’t want to be a man, which seems to sidestep a lot of emotional aspects that would have fit really well into the novel. While it was nice to see a trans character be openly embraced, the handling left so much to be desired and irked me. Moonlight Shadow is the other short story in this edition and it is... short. It covers much the same ground as Kitchen and feels like an earlier work. It was too sparse for me, too blank.

I think it's pretty depressing that this book came out in 2007--nearly 2 decades ago--and none of the problems regarding the monoculture of bananas, the problems with corporations owning GMOs for food billions of people rely on for food, the diseases in banana fruits, etc. have been resolved. I am now pretty convinced that, thanks to capitalism and greed, we are going to lose bananas within the next few decades.

I was less than enamored with Koeppel’s style, a combination of pedestrian prose and forced attempts at humor, often with a creepy confiding tone. There were some cutesy metaphors I could have done without, such as when he likens gene splicing to splicing together reels of film, producing “the best qualities of both: Rhett Butler played by Harrison Ford and Scarlet O’Hara with a cinnamon-bun hairstyle.” One of the greatest strengths of this book is that it's an honest portrayal as Zemurray as a complicated human being. It doesn't try to cover up his misdeeds or his involvement in some of the darkest and morally questionable acts in American foriegn policy during his era. Rather, it explains the rise of Cuyamel Fruit and Zemurray's eventual take over of United Fruit. But it does portray him as a fierce businessman who built one of the most influential companies in history. Con una prosa ligera y con una sensibilidad única, la autora, con sólo 24 años, describe el cómo se experimenta sentirse sola en el mundo. Tan sola que llegas al punto de encontrar calor en objetos inanimados o en lugares específicos. I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop. Houses always feel like that after someone has died."

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I also felt that many of the descriptions about Zemurray himself being a formidable figure came across as forced. He was the typical silent and gruff man who was smart about his business. Isn't Jay from Modern Family the same? Not trying to put down Zemurray here but I just didn't get enough details about him to form this larger-than-life figure that Cohen was trying to project. The story itself follows the paths takeb by Mikage and Yuichi (who suffers another tragedy of his own one which fits the trans-character dies first trope) and the choices they make, with food a common theme. This quote from the novel's setpiece highlight when Mikage takes a long taxi journey to 'rescue' Yuichi from an inn in an area where the only food served is variations on tofu, and ends up trying to scale the hotel balconiees to access his room while carrying a bowl of katsudon. Having moved to New Orleans in 1905, four years before United Fruit would win a Supreme Court case alleging that they had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, Zemurray met Jake “The Parrot King” Weinberger, an itinerant merchant who had extensive knowledge ofCentral America. (Zemurray would later marry Jake’s daughter Sarah). In 1910, Zemurray traveled toHonduras, where he bought 5,000 acres of land and met “characters” such as fugitive Texas embezzler William Sidney Porter (the author O. Henry). Zemurray found he was easily able to “grease the skids” of his enterprise by bribing officials of the heavily indebted Dávila government and by paying for Washingtonlobbyists to kill a plan by US Secretary of State Philander Knox to place a duty on all imports, bananas included. What's weak about this book is that you can tell that Cohen writes with a bit of a self righteous and condescending tone. He tries to describe Zemurray as an enigmatic figure who was fierce, yet deeply emotional, etc... when in the end, you look at Zemurray and realize he was just a businessman. A brilliant businessman, but just a businessman nonetheless.