The thing you realize after getting a few pages into Tristan Donovan's Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World is that the book is basically a history of America's dominance in the 20th century. It's all here: The wretched excess of soda fountain culture in the Gilded Age (the Arctic Soda Water Apparatus, a device created in 1876, "stood thirty-three feet high, weighed thirty tons, and measured twelve feet in diameter. It could dispense twenty-eight types of water and store seventy-six different flavoring syrups and was capped off with hanging ferns, a chandelier, and a device for spraying perfume into the air") which gave way to the Henry Ford-style industrialization of the soda-making process, followed by the attempts to win new territory in post-World War II Europe and eventual global colonization.

Donovan keeps things snappy and informative the whole way through. Nearly every page brings an interesting piece of trivia about how soda changed the world. Pepsi introduced the first thirty-second advertisement with a radio jingle that many stations at first refused to carry. (Most radio ads were five minutes or longer at the time.) Eventually, the thirty-second ad became so popular that stations were dying to play the song, and tens of thousands of people were happily buying the jingle on record:

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Soda pops up in the strangest places: Richard Nixon, for example, was a Pepsi man. When he finally won the presidency, he took back the Coca-Cola CEO's White House access pass. Soda brands have influenced diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and China, they've battled over access to outer space, and they've tried as hard as they can to keep their health risks underreported. It's a fascinating story.

Even though soda consumption has declined for nearly the past decade, our love affair with soda seems rock-solid. This 1936 speech delivered by a Coca-Cola executive to his employees on the fiftieth anniversary of the company seems to be truer than ever:

There may be war. We can stand that. There may be revolutions. We will survive. Taxes may bear down to the breaking point. We can take it. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may charge over the Earth and back again—and Coca-Cola will remain.

You can't argue with that kind of confidence.