Financial Times journalist Peter Chapman to lecture April 7

Financial Times journalist Peter Chapman will give a lecture and sign copies of his recently released book, “Bananas! How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World,” Monday, April 7, at the University of South Carolina.

Chapman will speak from 2:30 – 3:45 p.m. in Lumpkin Auditorium on the eighth floor of the Moore School of Business. The event is are free and open to the public.

In his book, released in January, Chapman relates the dubious business practices of the pioneering importer United Fruit to today’s global marketplace. Chapman follows the company from its 19th-century beginnings to its marketing of the banana as the first fast food to the company’s involvement in an invasion in Honduras, a massacre in Colombia and a bloody coup in Guatamala.

Hailed in the international media, the book has been called “finely crafted…vigorous and entertaining” by The Guardian and a “frightening read” by The Hindu. “Bananas” follows Chapman’s 2007 history of the United Fruit Company, titled “Jungle Capitalists: A Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution,” also published by Canongate.

Chapman, a columnist for the Financial Times, was a correspondent for the BBC and The Guardian in Central America and Mexico in the 1980s.

His appearance at the university is sponsored by the Moore School of Business in partnership with the College of Arts and Sciences’ Latin American Studies Program, the history department’s Warwick University Exchange Program and the Richard L. Walker Institute of International and Area Studies and the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies.

For more information about Chapman’s lecture and book signing, call 803-777-2910.