Customer Reviews

For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It

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Since my father was in the soft drink business for over 30 years -- he was a chemist for The Coca-Cola Company when I was born, and I believe we were the only kids on the block allowed to consume all the soda pop we desired, since we had cases of it in our garage -- I have always had an interest in the history of soda pop, and of The Coca-Cola Company in particular. I believe that even if the reader of this book was only marginally interested in Coke, he or she would be swept up in this well-researched and written book. Mark Pendergrast is a terrific writer -- this book reads like a compelling novel, and will be VERY difficult for the first-time reader to put down! I especially enjoyed the chapters on Coke's influence during WWII, as well as the "New Coke" debacle of the 1980's (the chapter is titled "The Worst Marketing Blunder of the Century"). Not to mention that the world-famous "secret formula" is revealed in this book as well! The only bone I have to pick with this edition is the lack of photos (which were in the first edition of this book). In a historical work like "For God, Country, and Coca-Cola" a photographic reference is absolutely necessary! Still a great read, though!P.S. I'm ordering a copy for my dad (who was a collegue of Coke president & CEO Roberto Goizueta in the 50's and 60's) - I know he'll get a kick out of it!

There is very little thought given to the role a "bottle of soda" plays in our lives. Reading the book, one can appreciate that brands like Coca-Cola, mean more than just a drink. How "brand-emotions" subconsciously carve a place inside you. The content is very well researched and has adequate information to grip the reader's attention to acquire more knowledge of, one of America's strongest and most successful brand names!

The events that followed its invention - simply lead you to believe that "Coke" was BORN to be great. The first real global company I ever knew!!

Basically, this is a book on the history of Coca-Cola, with some really good information on the cola industry as a whole. Well-researched, and well-written, I enjoyed this book. It was especially interesting to see the honesty in regard to the cocaine and caffiene content issues that Coke had to deal with, and later the "New Coke" fiasco. My only complaint would be with the length and that its a bit slow moving. The people involved certainly aren't very likeable, but the author does a good job of putting everything into a proper historical context. It even has the "secret formula" for the drink, which I found interesting just to know what I'm drinking.

This is a must read for Coca-Cola fans. Not only do you learn the history of Coca-Cola, you also get a refresher on your American History. The book reads very easily and is entertaining even.

I throughly enjoyed this book. I have wanted to purchase this book since it was first out in 1994. I am glad I waited. This version includes 30 management lessons that are worth the price of this book alone. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

Apart from being the most excellent and comprehensive history of Coca-Cola. It is a most invaluable book for a marketeer, as it chronicles the marketing innovations that Coca Cola pioneered from Liability Insurance, product placement, stress on promotions to point of sale merchandising.

On reading the book one is left with the feeling that Coca-Cola practically invented modern advertising and marketing as we know it.

In the late nineteenth century, cocaine was considered a wonder
drug. Heralded by medical journals, pharmacists, Freud and even several Popes - Pope Leo III was a regular imbiber of Vin Mariani, a wine created in 1863 that contained 2.16 grains of cocaine, in the recommended dose of six glasses per day. No doubt he felt very holy indeed, and his long life and "all-radiant" eyes were probably less due to his piety than his daily dose of this "healthful" and "life-sustaining" drug that had been so valued by the Incas.

Dr. John Pemberton, an Atlanta druggist and doctor - he held two degrees and had created a master reference work containing over 12,000 tests - was anxious to create a drink that would be healthful and profitable. He was not immune to the vast literature hailing cocaine as a wonder drug. "The use of the coca plant not only preserves the health of all who use it, but prolongs life to a very great old age and enables the coca eaters to perform prodigies of mental and physical labor," he wrote in 1885. It was a time when patent medicines and elixirs were all the rage. Soda fountains would often offer as many as 300 different combinations of drinks. Advertisers tried to influence consumers to purchase one in favor of others, and huge signs were erected along railroads and roads to get the traveler's attention. It was not unusual for a patent medicine "advertiser of the era to clear-cut an entire mountainside to that he could erect a mammoth sign for Helmholdt's Buchu." A contemporary traveler described, "enormous signs are erected in the fields, not a rock is left without disfigurement, and gigantic words glare at as great a distance as the eye is able to read them."

Pemberton's first product was French Wine Coca. It was loaded with cocaine, an extract of the kola nut (very high in caffeine) and damiana, the leaf of a plant with supposed aphrodisiacal powers. The concoction was advertised as a cure for virtually everything from nerve trouble and dyspepsia to impotence and morphine addiction.

Opiate addiction was a huge problem after the Civil War. Known as the "Army Disease" because so many veterans were addicted. Pemberton himself was an addict trying to break the habit. He was convinced that cocaine was the best treatment for morphine addiction.

In the meantime, by 1886, temperance was becoming a movement in the Atlanta area, so Pemberton began experimenting with a new beverage that excluded the wine. By adding citric acid, he eliminated some of the sugary sweet taste and eliminated the damiana but kept the coca and kola, hence the alliterative choice that his colleague Robinson came up with: Coca-Cola. They advertised it both for its medicinal benefits and as a new soda fountain drink. One ad read, "The new and popular soda fountain drink containing the properties of the wonderful coca plant and the famous cola nut." As it gained in popularity, the business convolutions kept pace, with Pemberton selling his rights to the business several times over. It was soon a mess.

Asa Candler finally wound up with ownership of the trademark. He remained committed to quality and insisted that his distributors (a rather unique arrangement for the time) not tinker with the syrup recipe, although some of them did, one adding saccharine in an attempt to preserve the drink -- it was also an ironic attempt to make the drink as sweet as possible. Candler never thought bottling the drink would amount to much, so he virtually gave away the bottling rights, a prognosticatory failure that was to cost the company millions in later years to purchase them back. He and Frank Robinson (the real marketing genius, who invented the script logo for the drink) soon were collecting huge amounts of money as Coke took off.

By 1900, Coca-Cola had become so popular it became a target for those who were terribly afraid someone might be out there enjoying themselves, i.e., the self-righteous, and soon pulpits all over attacked the nefarious qualities of the drink that was addicting children, of all people. It had also become a popular drink among the black population, and soon the KKK was suggesting that the black population was drinking Coca-Cola, becoming "drug fiends" and roaming the countryside in search of white women to ravish. Some white farm owners had indeed paid their sharecroppers, mostly black, with cocaine, since it was cheaper than alcohol, and cocaine addiction had become a serious problem. Ironically, Candler had already removed the minute traces of cocaine that had been in the formula. (The purity of the formula was somewhat of a joke, as several of the bottlers had added saccharin to make it sweeter, but also as a preservative.) The company by 1902 was promoting Coca-Cola as a healthful drink and the official Coke line is that the drink never contained cocaine, a typical PR prevarication, and not a particularly astute one since earlier company brochures had bragged about the healthful benefits of cocaine. In any case, the do-gooders, who wanted Coke declared an adulterated product because it contained caffeine managed to enlist the mighty forces of the FDA. Many expensive years later the suit finally died although Coke did reduce the amount of caffeine in the formula. They spent massive amounts of money on advertising, plastering the Coke logos on the sides of barns and giving out millions of items with the Coke logo. It was widely successful and soon Coke was the most popular drink around.

Pendergrast's section on the infamous New Coke marketing disaster - or was it really an enormous accidental success - is fascinating. The outrage was enormous, but the publicity that resulted showed tremendous loyalty to a drink. Odd hype occurred almost everywhere. A study at Harvard Medical School compared the douche properties of the old Coke to those of the new, and found that the old Coke killed five times as many sperm as the new Coke. That's weird. The company completely failed to recognize that Coca-Cola had become an American institution, an icon. "They talk as if Coca-Cola had just killed God," moaned one executive. Coca-Cola had come to symbolize America; it was "associated with almost every aspect of their lives - first dates, moments of victory and defeat, joyous group celebrations, pensive solitude."

"One share of original 1919 Coca-Cola stock had split into 1,152 shares by 1991, in addition to providing a cumulative dividend of over $10,000. If the dividends from that one original share had been reinvested in Coca-Cola stock, the $40 (or $5 for insiders) investment would now be worth almost two million dollars. Using the same scale, if a great grandparent had purchased one of Asa's $100 shares in 1892, it would now bring approximately $2.5 billion." - from FOR GOD, COUNTRY AND COCA-COLA

One of the enduring memories of my childhood, likely shared with millions of others, is getting a dime from one of my parents to buy and quaff an ice-cold Coke pulled from a filling-station's vending machine during a long drive on a hot day. After filling the car up with gas, Ol' Dad probably had a Coke also; aging memory fails on that point. (This was before auto air conditioning reached the sweaty masses.) The drinking experience was pure bliss. Over the half-century since, nothing has ever tasted better. It's an iconic experience, like a hot dog with all the fixin's at the ball game or pink cotton candy at the state fair handed-over fresh, warm and fragrant out of the spinner (not pre-made and pre-packaged in a plastic overwrap as it frequently comes today).

FOR GOD, COUNTRY AND COCA-COLA is Mark Pendergrast's prodigiously researched - 96 pages of Notes - on the soft-drink and the company that sells it from the former's creation in 1886 to the status of both in 1992. (The book was published in 1993.) Pendergrast's grandfather was an Atlanta druggist that sold Coca-Cola in his store's soda fountain.

With 425 pages of text and three photo sections, Mark's labor of love will tell you more than you'll ever need to know about "the real thing". Indeed, towards the end of the narrative, when the history gets somewhat bogged down detailing Coca-Cola's advertising strategy of the 1980s, it may be more than you wanted to know. But, never mind; the author is nothing if not comprehensively complete.

For me, the most fascinating elements of the volume were the descriptions of the "patent medicine" industry of the late nineteenth century, the company's efforts to get its product to the troops in World War II, and the evolution of the ongoing competition between Coca-Cola and its Great Enemy, Pepsi. Personally, I've always preferred the latter when imbibed by itself. But, if one is adding peanuts to the bottle - and it must be a glass bottle - then it simply has to be Coke; no other brand will do.

FOR GOD, COUNTRY AND COCA-COLA is long and perhaps not amenable to the reading interest of everyone. But, if you're intrigued by the subject matter, I don't imagine you'll find a more enlightening treatment of it on the bookshelves.

Coca-Cola is my 'poison' of choice. I love it so much and it's about all I drink; therefore I have always wanted to know all the details behind the company and the beginning of the beverage itself etc. This book is the best out there for all that you want to know about Coke.
It's very comprehensive (smallish print and over 450 pages (not including the notes and appendixes at the end). From information about the inventor John Pemberton to the marketing of this great soft drink, this is an excellent book to get some understanding into the Coke company and the drink itself. Just be warned; it's a long and hard going read, but if you are truly interested in it, it flows well and you'll get through it easily.

This book, in an entertaining fashion, not only makes you understand the world and mindset which Coca-Cola dwells in, but WHY it is the way it is. This is critical in any real understanding of a company, especially if you are looking at it from an investment point of view. Don't expect to find information that allows you to directly apply some numbers to formulas and come up with investment metrics. Do expect to find a clear and engaging description of how Coca-Cola became the company it is and what might constitute real threats to it's growth and market leadership. In the last chapter a Coca-Cola man offers our author the secret recipie. By then I could easily see that knowing how to make Coca-Cola would be uselss in competing against the company today, but we are taken through the exercise in reasoning anyways.

Overall, a very good read. Set aside two days alone to read this, if you can. I read this one on vacation during a long weekend and really enjoyed it.

I have always had a great fascination for the things that seem to define our lives in the Western world - those great style and cultural icons of our times. And nothing seems to typify this, in a truly frivolous sense of course, more than Coca Cola.

This is detailed, meticulously researched and absolutely FASCINATING study of the history of Coke - not just who first made it and how it was first presented to a thirsty public (and no, it doesn't give you the formula), but how it has grown to become something that looms large in everyone's life, even if you're not a fan. More people drink Coca Cola in the world than coffee, but at this point I must confess that I don't drink Coke myself.

There are entertaining stories of how the product evolved from a syrup served at every soda bar (ever wondered about that cocaine rumour - its in the book!); how every soldier in WW2 had a coke at the front, even if they didn't have bullets and medical supplies; and how jealously Coke guard their market share and branding. There are some really funny anecdotes from the Coke/Pepsi wars, especially when the formula was tinkered with to gain competitive advantage, and my favourite is the lady who berates a poor man stocking shelves with the "new" Coke, and when the man stacking Pepsi laughs, she berates him for his product as well. This is an amusing study of our society and how this innocent fizzy brown drink has become one of the most universally recognised products of our times.

I remember I was reading this one night and my husband declared that he thought the whole book was nothing but an advertisement for Coca Cola. I laughed, told him it was a very entertaining study of a product that is now literally everywhere in the world. I then asked him to get me a Coke.