Volume 23, Number 16 · October 14, 1976
Bananas
By John Kenneth Galbraith
An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit
by Thomas P. McCann, edited by Henry Scammell
Crown, 244 pp., $8.95
The author of this book was for twenty years a senior official of United Fruit[1] and one fact must be put down at the outset: it is about as bad as a book can be and still get printed, which is now very bad. The writing is grammatical but vacuous—'free enterprise simple Simon' I believe the style is called. Its author cannot always stay with a thought for a paragraph and never in any organized way for a chapter. He has little understanding of the modern corporation and, I believe, he gets the story of United Fruit wrong, And yet in a curious way the book is interesting, the interest being in what so disingenuous and agreeable a man says about his depraved job and about a company with which, always on the seamy side, he was associated for so long.
Review, 2513 words
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