AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Mr. Wrights imagined history of the rise and fall of the sugary drink empire is so robust and recognizable that you might feel nostalgic for the taste of a soda youve never had. Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal NAMED AMOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BYParade CosmopolitanTown Country AARP InStyle Garden Gun Vol. 1 BrooklynThe story of a family.The story of an empire. The story of a nation.Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynastythe Forsters, founders of the worlds first major soft-drink companyagainst the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history. The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted morefrom his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his fathers drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation theyll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the infernal twins, are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disabilityand later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after hes gone.An irresistible tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop blends fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthornes words, families are always rising and falling in America, and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memoryand the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Mr. Wrights imagined history of the rise and fall of the sugary drink empire is so robust and recognizable that you might feel nostalgic for the taste of a soda youve never had. Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal NAMED AMOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BYParade CosmopolitanTown Country AARP InStyle Garden Gun Vol. 1 BrooklynThe story of a family.The story of an empire. The story of a nation.Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynastythe Forsters, founders of the worlds first major soft-drink companyagainst the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history. The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted morefrom his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his fathers drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation theyll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the infernal twins, are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disabilityand later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after hes gone.An irresistible tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop blends fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthornes words, families are always rising and falling in America, and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memoryand the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.