Jungle Capitalists, by Peter Chapman

As Peter Chapman perceptively notes, we in the North may find bananas an irresistibly comic object, but there are no banana jokes in Central America. Consuming them is one thing, producing them under the aegis of America's first multinational corporations another. Jungle Capitalists is the engagingly told tale of United Fruit, the biggest and meanest of these extraordinary companies.

The firm was known in its Latino backyard as "La Compania" or the more menacing "El Pulpo" (the octopus), and Chapman follows the many tentacles of United Fruit's mendacious history. This began in the 1860s when Minor Keith, an itinerant engineer, started building railroads in Costa Rica. He diversified into banana plantations, built on government-sanctioned land grabs, and forced labour.

By the end of the First World War, the company had carved out a far-flung empire that stretched from Colombia to the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Cuba and Dominica: the original banana republics. The region's micro-elites had been bought, the US persuaded to support a coup in Honduras to protect the company's interests. Competitors, producers and distributors were bankrupted by price manipulation and bought for a song.

The next half-century was a golden age of super-profits. A vast, rationalised bureaucracy, United Fruit relentlessly extracted money from plantations, deployed the new science of public relations and - just to make sure - orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemala's most progressive government in 1954.

Like the rest of corporate America, it was temporarily befuddled by the counter-cultures, before falling prey to the economic crises of the 1970s. After financial shenanigans, the company reformed as the superlatively bland Chiquita. It remains a key player in the invidious network of the global food corporations, powerful enough to force the WTO and EU to abandon support for small Caribbean planters.

With such a vast canvas, Chapman has his hands full. The tiny but delightful cameos of Carmen Miranda, Andy Warhol and Evelyn Waugh were worth more space. Best is Chapman's account of the precarious ecology of the modern banana that United Fruit helped create. This clumsy, disease-prone species appears poised between unholy genetic manipulation and pestilential extinction. Perhaps, then, the North will not find this fruit quite so risible.