Welcome to Litsy!

Need a good laugh? Start by pronouncing it bənänä instead of bənănə. Or... or instead of piränə (I've never heard it pronounced with an ñ) oh never mind! Just make them rhyme. You will not be disappointed. TW: There will be butts.

Well, I was halfway there finishing my #roll100 choices. All were good, none were great. I guess my favorite was the tagged, which is some interesting nonfiction about corporate takeover, corruption and coups associated with the banana industry and its one-time king. I bailed on The Birth of the Pill, a mood-reader moment.

Love it when my son reads me the bedtime story instead of the other way around. We both enjoyed this one.

Informative, interesting book on the United Fruit company - which later became known as Chiquita - and their expansion across and exploitation of Central America from mid 19th century toward today. An empire unto itself - with close allies in the US govt - their practices in propaganda, intervening in govts, union busting, pollution, worker exploitation and generally rigging the game they were a blueprint for later globalisation.

One of the prompts for #Nonfiction2021 was “sunshiney or yellow,“ and what's more yellow than a banana? I've been interested in food justice issues for a long time (the pic is a banana article I wrote in 2002) and Koeppler does an excellent job of tracing the history and diversity of banana varieties, tackling the incredible history of corporate domination and exploitation involved, and looking into the risky future of the current popular strain.

1. Christmas Day with my parents and painting a bedroom.
2. Brandon Sanderson, Robin Hobb, Neil Gaiman.
3. A Calendar of Indifferent Bananas.
#wonderouswednesday @Eggs

Every single banana from the week‘s harvest is carefully skinned, then segregated, so that one breed doesn‘t mix with another. The peeling at HFIS is done by women, paid $10 a day, about double the Honduran wage. Aguilar says they are better at precision work than men. “They handle the fruit more gently,” he told me, “and they have better handwriting.” Each fruit has to be logged so its success or failure can be tracked through the growing cycle.

In 1952 [Guatemalan President Arbenz] issued decree 900. The law would redistribute land to local peasants. It allowed the government to confiscate any farm over 223 acres with a key condition: the land had to be unused. Nearly a quarter of a million acres were divided among 100,000 families...[United Fruit] hired a newspaperman to write a story that would “investigate” the links between Guatemala and the Soviet Union.

Last book I reviewed was about how coffee has screwed large parts of central and southern American, this book .... fruit. In the late 19th and 20th century, several m major American companies used the cheap resources of the local communities to produce a variety of new tropical fruits including bananas. By the 1950‘s said fruit companies assisted by the CIA were overthrowing governments who dared to ask for a share of the profits (Damned commies)

While I am actually allergic to bananas, I am deeply fascinated by the history of the banana. This book was so well written and researched, I loved reading it and learned so much!