Word: banana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...paper there is no fruit so appealing to raise as the richest relative of the lily family, the banana. It grows so fast that it goes from bulb to cash crop in twelve months. It is the biggest moneymaker per acre of any crop grown anywhere, and is so popular that U.S. housewives buy more pounds of bananas each year than any other produce item. Yet under its golden peel there are a host of troubles, and in recent years United Fruit Co.-the world's largest banana grower and marketer-has had them...
Until five years ago. with postwar banana sales rocketing. United Fruit was reaping profits by merely filling orders in the eleven American and European nations where it has sales offices. Then its plantations in Panama and Honduras were all but wiped out by a combination of wind, floods and the Panama disease, which by infecting the soil puts banana land out of cultivation almost indefinitely. Small Ecuadorian growers jumped in to capture 25% of the world banana market. Meantime, United Fruit's own share of the world market, which in 1948 stood at over 40% skidded to below...
...composition, but he never seemed able to integrate this talent with Marguerite Duras' rather somnolent script. Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, wrote novels that yearned for visual expression. In La Jalousie, for instance, he spends most of his time painting in the very smallest details of a banana plantation. Amid the minutiae, the author tells an exceedingly ambiguous tale of a husband's jealousy, a tale that never quite escapes from the encroaching landscape drawn in so heavily that it overshadows all else...
...Touch of Banana Peel. Rowlandson first exhibited a drawing when he was only 18, and soon both Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West were praising him. But serious painting on a large scale never suited the Rowlandson temperament. A ?7,000 legacy from an aunt gave him a taste for high living, and he wandered through Europe and England, drinking, talking, gambling-and drawing. He illustrated a dozen books including Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. His work became so popular that a new industry arose in London: producing fake Rowlandsons...
...carriages and coaches capsized or collided, his ships careened drunkenly, his proud hunters tumbled ignominiously from their horses. At times, the humor is rather on the banana-peel level; but for the most part, it has a rare gentleness...