"The Fish That Ate the Whale," by Rich Cohen Amid the vast outpouring of literature about America's banana empire in the Caribbean, no one seems to have written a full-fledged biography of the remarkable Samuel Zemurray, who guided the United Fruit Company through perilous times. Rich Cohen has rectified that oversight. Cohen, the author of "Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams" and "Sweet and Low: A Family Story," now gives us the fascinating tale of "Sam the Banana Man," a poor Russian Jew who emigrated to Alabama as a teenager and ended up controlling much of Central America. After starting out as a humble banana peddler in Mobile in the 1890s, Zemurray moved up to become a major importer in New Orleans, shipping in fruit from his firm's plantations in Honduras. When the Honduran president, Miguel Dávila, placed obstacles in his path in 1910, Zemurray simply hired some mercenaries, orchestrated a sham revolution and replaced Dávila with a more compliant president. Cohen duly condemns Zemurray's colonialist arrogance but also admires his chutzpah. At times, Cohen waxes almost Kiplingesque as he celebrates the man and his myrmidons: I want here to sing an ode to the banana cowboy, that wild, unshaven, hell-raising fighter of yore, terror of the isthmus, hired gun in time of conflict, filibuster in time of revolution, arrived from the streets of New Orleans and San Francisco and Galveston, no good for decent society, spitting tobacco juice and humping extra shells in his saddlebag. These roughnecks found a benefactor in Zemurray, who rode and drank with them. Zemurray was first a customer, then a major competitor of United Fruit, though his own firm was much smaller. In 1929 he sold out to his rival for 300,000 shares of United Fruit stock and retired to New Orleans, where Huey Long assailed him as a corrupt plutocrat. Meanwhile, the Depression was laying waste to United Fruit's balance sheet. As the value of Zemurray's stock plummeted, he decided it was time to foment another revolution. He staged a boardroom coup and installed himself as chief executive, prompting The New York Times to call him "the fish that swallowed the whale." Zemurray led United Fruit back into the black. He also had a hand in the founding of Israel. But his final triumph, in Guatemala, would leave a dark legacy. There, United Fruit confronted a democratically elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, who began redistributing the firm's uncultivated lands to peasants. This time, instead of hiring armed mercenaries, Zemurray hired the public relations guru Edward L. Bernays to paint Arbenz as a Communist, while urging the Eisenhower administration to intervene. In 1954 the C.I.A. staged a coup that toppled Arbenz, touching off a cycle of revolution and reaction that lasted decades and claimed thousands of lives. Zemurray died at 84 in 1961, just a few months after the C.I.A."s Bay of Pigs fiasco had demonstrated the limits of his approach to empire management. In Cohen's hyperbolic and often speculative telling, Zemurray looms as such a titan that even the United Fruit co-founder Minor C. Keith, "the uncrowned king of Central America," recedes into Zemurray's shadow. Cohen scarcely mentions the Vaccaro brothers, Zemurray's fellow immigrants and fierce rivals, who founded Standard Fruit. And Cohen banishes Zemurray's relative-by-marriage Lillian Hellman to the obscurity of an endnote, even though Zemurray loomed large in her life and also, it seems, in her literature. For a balanced, comprehensive, sober-minded assessment of Zemurray's career, readers should consult the many histories of United Fruit in its heyday. But Rich Cohen books constitute a genre unto themselves: pungent, breezy, vividly written psychodramas about rough-edged, tough-minded Jewish machers who vanquish their rivals, and sometimes change the world in the process. Within this specialized context, Cohen's Zemurray biography admirably fills the bill. Mark Lewis is writing a book about America's colonial experience in the Philippines.