A Family Story

Sweet and Low

A fascinating story of the invention which made one of the great American fortunes, by the critically-acclaimed author of Tough Jews

Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews, The Avengers and Lake Effect. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and lives in New York City.

Rich Cohen's maternal grandfather was called Ben Eisenstadt. Ben was one of those Jews that, with an anger bred of exclusion, went on to reshape the world. He did so by inventing Sweet 'n Low, a granulated sweetener which, in its tiny pink packet, is still found on every table in every diner in America. This simple invention spawned one of the great American fortunes. This is the story of that fortune, how it was made and how it remade and tore apart everyone who touched it. 
 
In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen - the youngest son of Ben's favourite daughter - takes a journey into his own and his family's past. It is a story of family feuds (his mother was eventually disinherited by her mother), eccentricity verging on madness, gangsters, lawyers, corruption, accountants, ex-wives - a quest for a secret history, a black comedy of the American dream.

The Life and Times of America's Banana King

The Fish that Ate the Whale

The remarkable historical profile of an unforgettable figure - Sam Zemurray, the Banana Man - who emerged from nothing to become one of the most powerful men in America.

I found the story riveting, mainly because of the mischievous ease with which Cohen tells it. He has done his research, but he's no prissy, footnote-addled academic

This is a rollicking but brilliantly researched book about one of the most fascinating characters of the twentieth century. I grew up in New Orleans enthralled by the tales of Sam Zemurray, the banana peddler who built United Fruit. This book recounts, with delightful verve, his military and diplomatic manoeuvres in Central America and his colourful life and business practices

Walter Isaacson, author of 'Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography'

Sam 'The Bannanaman' Zemurray was a larger than life character. Rich Cohen is a superb storyteller. Put them together and you have a startling and often hilarious account of one of the forgotten heroes (and villains) of the American empire

This remarkable book… is a beautifully written homage to a man whose pioneering life mirrors so much of America’s beauty and beastliness. The life of Sam the Banana Man is Cohen’s eloquent hands, is as nourishing and odd as the bendy yellow berry that made him great

Great fun… The author has a tremendous imaginative facility, and he brings vividly to life the broiling quays of of New Orleans in its commercial heyday

Rich Cohen…has undoubtedly picked a remarkable subject and infuses the narrative with a breathless excitement

Rich Cohen is an editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone and the author of four books, including Tough Jews and the widely acclaimed memoir Sweet and Low.

Whether you know him as El Amigo, the Banana Man, the Gringo, or simply Z - whether you even know him at all - Sam Zemurray lived one of the greatest untold American stories of the last hundred years. 
 
A tough, uneducated Russian Jew who found himself and his fortune in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Zemurray built a fruit-selling empire hustling rotting fruit to market to eke out the slimmest profit, to eventually become a backchannel kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary. The Fish That Ate the Whale spans the transition from Old-World business to New-: from privateer adventurers seeking fortunes in remote frontiers, to buccaneers of high finance and wars fought with media, no-bid contracts, and necessary illusions. 
 
Part of what makes this book so remarkable - and its dubious hero so compelling - is the almost invisible ease with which Cohen's threads intertwine to create a larger pattern that seems so obvious once you step back to see it. Z's story spans the birth of modern foreign relations, the creation of the CIA, smuggling dispossessed Jews out of Europe, the invention of Israel, corporate espionage, the Bay of Pigs, political assassination, and the unspoken motives of the Cold War. It is a twentieth-century epic, and standing at its core is a man unlike any we've seen before or since, who, for good or ill, looked at what was, but saw only what was possible.

The Avengers

'Gripping and even inspiring' Sunday Times

Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Observer, the New York Times and many other magazines. He is currently contributing editor at Rolling Stone and lives in New York City.

When they were not yet twenty years old three young Jews left their families in Western Poland and came to the Lithuanian ghetto of Vilna. Abba, leader of the young people in the ghetto and Rushka and Vitka were his deputies. Together they organised the first underground movement in Europe, mapping the sewers and using the tunnels beneath the city to smuggle food and weapons into and out of the ghetto. In 1943 they escaped the ghetto and led their band of resistance fighters deep into the forests of Poland, where they lived for the remainder of the war. From here, they bombed the occupied city they loved. When the war was over Abba, Vitka and Rushka went to Israel, but they did not forget what they had learned in Vilna and in the forest.

Tough Jews

A terrific storyteller, drawing you right into the tenements where young thugs were recruited, the shooting wars and the perceived betrayals, the labour rackets and all-night card games...Few of the tough Jews Cohen writes about lived to see the inside of a recruitment community. They died young and they died out. But this is a dazzling tribute to their courage and to their cool.

In the history of American crime - organised crime - Italian names predominate, but there was a time when Jewish names ran them close...Rich Cohen...grew up long after the events he describes, but he has still managed to write an intensely personal book...It is an exciting story...In filling in the detail, Cohen doesn't just rely on family legend, or his imagination: he has done a great deal of research in police archives. But it's the sense of personal involvement which gives the book its pace and its energy...highly readable.

Rich Cohen has written for the New Yorker, the New York Observer, the New York Times and many other magazines. He is currently a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He lives in New York City.

Once upon a time, back in the 20s and 30s, in Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who exist now only in legend and in the memories of a few old men. Their names were Louis Lepke, Abe Reles, Bugsy Segel, Dutch Shultz, Meyer Lansky, and they were Jewish gangsters: Jews with Guns; tough, fearles Jews who roamed the streets in a time when a Jewish boy could fashion a future that was murderous and daring and wide open. Rich Cohen's father grew up in that world; his family owned the diner where the gangsters known as Murder Incorporated hung out. In TOUGH JEWS he tells their stories and brilliantly evokes their world - a world of street corners and bars and nightclubs; a world where murder was better than cowerdice; where killings were planned and executed with precision and finesse; a world of feuds, wars, schemes, where living into middle age was akind of victory; a world in which for a brief moment, Jews were among the most important criminals in America.

Rich Cohen

Accomplishes the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story... by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion. Provocative and entertaining … Cohen brings tough love to Judaism and modern Israel

A smart, energetic overview of the history of Israel and its relation to the Jewish people, from biblical times to the present. Cohen's narrative is propelled by muscular prose and an irreverent wit at times reminiscent of Jon Stewart.... Absorbing, clear-eyed history

A sweeping and impressionistic saga... [which] also happens to be a page-turning delight to read. What other book about Zionist history has ever included references to “Howl,” “Goodfellas,” Joseph Mitchell, and Willie Dixon? I commend and admire this book

There are many books about Israel, but none like this. From Rich Cohen, the author of the acclaimed Tough Jews, The Avengers, and Sweet and Low, comes a new approach to a story we thought we knew. Breaking through the heated polemics and intractable politics, Israel Is Real is a fresh voice, a tale of people and ideas, of the background of present-day Israel. 
 
Cohen relates Israel's story as that of a place long ago destroyed and transformed into an idea . . . and which, sixty years ago, was retransformed into a place, and therefore into something that can once again be destroyed. From the medieval false prophets, to the nineteenth-century Zionists, and on to present-day figures like Ariel Sharon, Cohen tells the stories of the people obsessed with this fine line between place and idea, creation and destruction. He reclaims from obscurity a multitude of figures marginalised by history, but whose lives are key to any real understanding of Israel.

Rich Cohen

Praise for Israel is Real

Accomplishes the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story... by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion. Provocative and entertainin ...

A smart, energetic overview of the history of Israel and its relation to the Jewish people, from biblical times to the present. Cohen's narrative is propelled by muscular prose and an irreverent wit at times reminis ...

A sweeping and impressionistic saga... [which] also happens to be a page-turning delight to read. What other book about Zionist history has ever included references to “Howl,” “Goodfellas,” Joseph Mitchell, and Will ...

Accomplishes the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story... by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion. Provocative and entertainin ...

A smart, energetic overview of the history of Israel and its relation to the Jewish people, from biblical times to the present. Cohen's narrative is propelled by muscular prose and an irreverent wit at times reminis ...

A sweeping and impressionistic saga... [which] also happens to be a page-turning delight to read. What other book about Zionist history has ever included references to “Howl,” “Goodfellas,” Joseph Mitchell, and Will ...

Accomplishes the miraculous. It made a subject that has vexed me since early childhood into a riveting story... by narrating the oft-told saga of the Jews in a fresh and engaging fashion. Provocative and entertainin ...

A smart, energetic overview of the history of Israel and its relation to the Jewish people, from biblical times to the present. Cohen's narrative is propelled by muscular prose and an irreverent wit at times reminis ...

A sweeping and impressionistic saga... [which] also happens to be a page-turning delight to read. What other book about Zionist history has ever included references to “Howl,” “Goodfellas,” Joseph Mitchell, and Will ...

Books by Rich Cohen

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter