Smoking Bananas: Long before “banana republic” came to mean that store in the mall across from Sbarro, the term referred to any and all of the countries of Central America at one time or another between the end of the American Civil War and the mid-1970s. This was the era of the United Fruit Company, one of the first multinational corporations and certainly one of the most insidious, as documented in British journalist Peter Chapman’s book Bananas!: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (Canongate US, 2008). After discovering a market in America for bananas, a handful of businessmen began buying up huge swaths of land for plantations from the impoverished governments of Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala and built railroads to transport the fruit from the interior to the coasts, where their private cargo fleet waited to haul it to the larger world.

By the turn of the century, United Fruit had gone from owning the land to owning the rulers, through massive private loans, control of the workforce, and in many cases, outright muscle provided by its own army of mercenaries. The company constituted a de facto government, an undeclared American state south of the border, undeterred by American anti-trust laws or scrutiny of its unchecked excesses in the region. In the Gilded Age, United Fruit’s brio was applauded as a triumph of laissez-faire capitalism, and by the time of the Cold War it was deemed a bulwark against Latin-American communism and company ships were even part of the fleet that facilitated the Bay of Pigs invasion. Either way, the United States government turned a blind eye to the banana giant, and it seemed inconsequential how much blood was flowing down there as long as the bananas didn’t stop.

Chapman squeezes every bit of information he can out of his primary sources, even when those sources are less than complete, and the result is uneven reportage. Some events feel glossed over while others are examined in exhaustive detail - you will learn more about the banana itself than you ever needed to know - but overall Chapman paints a fascinating portrait of a place and a time too often overlooked in the history books, when one private enterprise was allowed to cross the line of responsible business and become a world power unto itself. Given the current climate of interdependency between megaconglomerates and governments (including our own), it’s a lesson worth a look.

Wild and Crazy, But Important, Guys: If it’s possible for a television show to change lives, our lives were changed by “Saturday Night Live.” As a kid in the ’70s, I was allowed to stay up late on Saturday nights to catch it, and I never missed an episode, and neither did anyone else. It wasn’t simply that the sketches were daring and hilarious (they were, and it is a profound mystery to me that the show is so relentlessly unfunny today), but the fact that SNL provided the first real national exposure to the emerging school of stand-up comedians who didn’t rely on mother-in-law jokes and snappy punch lines like those guys on Johnny Carson. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman pushed the boundaries of what comedy is and what it can do. I started buying their albums, startling my mother with a newfound command of four-letter words but also becoming aware of what a subversive and powerful force comedy can be in the right hands.

Time reporter Richard Zoglin knows all about it and traces the rise of observational and avant-garde stand-up in the post-Nixon years in his book Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970’s Changed America (Bloomsbury USA, 2008). Zoglin begins with the profound impact of Lenny Bruce in the 1950s, when Bruce and his contemporaries eschewed the tired schtick of the Borscht Belt comics in favor of free-form monologues that challenged our notions of propriety and good taste, transforming comedy from idle amusement to performance art in its own right. Inspired by Bruce’s ability to make people laugh by daring to speak truth to power, the next generation of comics ran with it, making funny out of the postmodern absurdities of politics, language, relationships and the tragic ways human beings treat each other. Along the way, Zoglin follows the rise of stand-up as an industry, from the first all-comedy clubs in New York to the late-'80s boom when comedy clubs became as ubiquitous as Starbucks.

Zoglin’s book is inclusive and incredibly well-researched, drawing on extensive interviews with club owners, television folk and comics, including a few like Jerry Seinfeld and David Letterman, who are notoriously private. He touches on the personalities who continue to thrive, like Robin Williams and Jay Leno, but also makes the case for a number of comics, such as Robert Klein and Elayne Boosler, who were pioneers in the field but have dropped off the national radar. The book is a terrific pocket education in pop-culture history as well as long-overdue props to the people who made it possible for even talentless punks like Dane Cook to ply their trade. Highly recommended, as well as Steve Martin’s recent autobiography, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Scribner, 2007).

Notes from the Margins: Young fantasy fans can rejoice, or at least relax. Random House has at long last announced a release date for the third installment of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, the heroic fantasy series which began with Eragon and Eldest and made Paolini, who started writing these things at 15, a superstar among young readers. The new book will be titled Brisingr and will be released on Sept. 20, 2008. Anticipation for this book has been enormous, the lousy film version of Eragon notwithstanding. The publisher has been flooded with advance orders, and I’ve already been forced to Tase my 13-year-old son several times.

Patricia Cornwell, former forensic scientist and wildly successful novelist, is fighting back against a wave of negative reviews for her latest, Book of the Dead (Penguin, 2007). It seems that shortly after the book’s release, its entry on Amazon.com was deluged with pans, which Cornwell attributes to, of all things, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, claiming that she has been targeted by the Bush Administration after refusing to appear at a pro-war rally aboard an aircraft carrier. Who knows, it may be true, but it smells funny for a couple of reasons. Primarily one wonders why anyone would ask Patricia Cornwell, of all people, to an event like that in the first place. Was Chuck Norris not available? Jessica Simpson? Charo? A Snap-on Tools girl? It seems like a pretty elaborate dodge for what looks simply like Cornwell’s readers reacting to a lousy book. After all, bestselling authors do write the occasional stinker. In fact, Clive Cussler’s made a career of it.

Speaking of career moves, it turns out that I have been grossly misinformed as to the nature of the word “retirement.” My understanding was that “retirement” meant that you worked for a long time and then you stopped. Since the Republicans eviscerated Social Security, of course, that definition has undergone some tweaking, but if you’re Stephen King and have more money than any writer ought to have, your retirement should mean that you’re done. Nonetheless King’s “retirement” doesn’t seem to have stopped him from cranking out his column for Entertainment Weekly, editing the latest Best American Short Stories, or releasing a novel a year, like this year’s Duma Key (Scribner), which is the size of a major metropolitan phone book. King’s a freak. When I retire, I plan to play bingo until I die.

John G. Nettles