AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Mr. Wright's 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 you've never had." - Sam Sacks, The Wall
Street Journal
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY Parade - Cosmopolitan - Town &
Country - AARP - InStyle - Garden & Gun - Vol. 1 Brooklyn
The 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 dynasty--the Forsters, founders of the world's
first major soft-drink company--against the backdrop of more than a
century of American cultural history.
The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more--from
his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his
father's 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 they'll 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 disability--and later generations seem
equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider
who should control the company after he's 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
Hawthorne's words, "families are always rising and falling in America,"
and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural
memory--and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
