Fizz

Book excerpt: The story of soda is the story of the modern world, a tale of glamorous bubbles, sparkling dreams, big bucks, miracle cures and spreading waistlines. Fizz! How Soda Shook Up The World charts soda's remarkable, world-changing journey from awe-inspiring natural mystery to ubiquitous presence in all our lives. Along the way you'll meet the quack medicine peddlers who spawned some of the world's biggest brands with their all-healing concoctions as well as the grandees of science and medicine mesmerized by the magic of bubbling water. You'll discover how fizzy pop cashed in on Prohibition, helped presidents reach the White House, and became public health enemy number one. You'll learn how Pepsi put the fizz in Apple's marketing and how soda's sticky sweet allure defined and built nations. And you'll find out how a soda-loving snail rewrote the law books. Fizz! tells the extraordinary tale of how a seemingly simple everyday refreshment zinged and pinged over our taste buds and, in doing so, changed the world around us. Tristan Donovan is the author of Replay: The History of Video Games. His work has appeared in the Times, Stuff, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Big Issue, among others.