Word: fruits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Where words and bullets have failed against the Europeans, economics may succeed. Shopkeepers and factory owners face ruin as the result of prolonged strikes, failures in communications, and war damage. Fruit and vegetables lie rotting in trucks and on farms. Stocks have fallen so low that it is impossible to buy such ordinary staples as shoelaces, but the S.A.O. still insists that all Europeans meet special "tax" levies. An Oran restaurateur says. ''Of course I'm proud of my support of the S.A.O., but it's costing me $800 in business each...
...they are only dimly illuminating. Somehow the fact that Hart Crane was a drunk and had a penchant for throwing his typewriter out a window becomes more important than his poetry. All in all, the book brings to mind a remark of Joseph Conrad's: "In plucking the fruit of memory, one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom...
Both the Right and the Left in America have their own memories about the period of flirtation with Marx. To the Right, it has become the decade of treason, when Americans ate of totalitarian fruit and knew sin; the guilt and hysteria of the late '40's and early '50's extended to liberals who had never been associated with the Communist Party in the '30's, even to men who were born too late to be part of the decade of treason. Thus the weakest and least sympathetic portion of Arthur M. Schlesinger's Age of Roosevelt...