Founders: Sam Zemurray (The Fish That Ate the Whale)

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What I learned from rereading The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen. ---- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book ---- [4:47] This story can shock and infuriate us, and it does. But I found it invigorating, too. It told me that the life of the nation was written not 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. [8:56] Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer by Stephen Dando-Collins (Founders #55) [10:00] Unlike Vanderbilt's other adversaries William Walker was not afraid of Cornelius when he should have been. [12:21] The immigrants of that era could not afford to be children. [12:42] The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World's Greatest Negotiator by Rich Cohen [12:54] He was driven by the same raw energy that has always attracted the most ambitious to America, then pushed them to the head of the crowd. Grasper, climber-nasty ways of describing this kid, w

[00:00:00] When he arrived in America in 1891, at age 14, Zimuri was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans 69 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 in Central America. He battled and conquered United Fruit, which was one of the first truly global corporations. Zamuri's life is a parable of [00:00:31] the American dream, not history as recorded in the textbooks, but the authentic version, a subterranean saga of…

Founders: Sam Zemurray (The Fish That Ate the Whale)

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