Among the other "injustices" Blanding documents in his occasionally overzealous introduction: "decimating water supplies of villagers in India and Mexico, busting up unions in Turkey and Guatemala, making kids fat throughout the United States and Europe, and hoodwinking consumers into swallowing glorified tap water marketed under its bottled water brand Dasani." Their origin, Blanding argues, is Coke's single-minded pursuit of profit, and he accordingly devotes the book's first half to the evolution of the company and its brand.

Beginning with John Pemberton, the pharmacist who invented the drink in 1886, Blanding traces Coke's century-long commercial explosion: the company's pioneering shift from hard-sell salesmanship to the image-based advertising that persists today; its incorporation, which led to the need to please shareholders with ever-growing profits; its worldwide expansion during World War II; the growing portion sizes of the 1950s; and, in the 1980s, the invention of high-fructose corn syrup, the cheap sweetener that would boost profit margins even further. These early chapters sometimes drag, since they are not buoyed by the original reporting that makes the second half of the book so good. They also reveal a problem that tends to plague books like The Coke Machine even if they remain, as this book does, important and readable: Blanding's account is sometimes hijacked by anti-corporate fervor so strong it threatens to turn off readers, especially those who don't share his liberal politics.

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His diction is peppered with cheap shots, as when he writes, "By the turn of the century, Coke was metastasizing," or "The product itself had begun to worm its way into the American consciousness." He also doesn't always pick his battles well. Murder seems like a good target, but is the "hoodwinking" of consumers into drinking purified, bottled tap water really anything more than a smart marketing strategy? In addition, Blanding attacks the fact that Coke doesn't like to discuss "the kick early imbibers got from the drink from its namesake ingredient—cocaine." But he admits that it contained only coca leaf, the unrefined form of the drug—and, what's more, that in 1891 the president of the Georgia Pharmaceutical Association stated that the dose was "so small that it would be simply impossible for anyone to form the cocaine habit by drinking Coca-Cola."

Still, there can be no doubt that by the 1980s, the pursuit of profits and "shareholder value"—massive short-term returns for Wall Street—had become Coke's deities. As Coke's then-CEO, Roberto Goizueta, put it, "I wrestle over how to build shareholder value from the time I get up in the morning to the time I go to bed. I even think about it when I am shaving." With the possible exception of an activist named Ray Rogers, Goizueta is Blanding's most compelling character: a corporate titan so bold that in 1985 he (disastrously) changed Coke's sacred secret formula, although that didn't stop the company from awarding him an $80-million bonus in 1991—at the time, the largest lump payout ever given to an American CEO. His success was instead foreshadowed by another decision: He installed a computer screen displaying a live feed of the company's share price at the main entrance to Coca-Cola's headquarters, even though the Internet did not yet exist. It was the first thing employees saw in the morning and the last thing they saw as they left.