When it comes to be written, the history of the current century will inevitably be viewed through its indigenous consumer culture, and seen not least through the distorting glass of the classic hobbleskirt Coca-Cola bottle.

Fanciful? Consider - The Coca-Cola Company (they are fiercely protective of the definite article) is America's sixth largest public company, its classic script logo the most recognised trademark in the world. Since 1990, The World of Coca-Cola Museum receives more than one million visitors annually. From a standing-stop, The Company invested $450 million in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall; inside two years they were selling 1.7 billion drinks. If Coke catches cold, America sneezes.

And all this from a soft drink never once containing so much as a grain of cocaine. Officially. As author Mark Pendergrast tells us, The Company is so defensive of history that it has, in effect, seen it redrafted. Conventionally, Coca-Cola was the miraculous invention of a poor Southern root doctor, John Pemberton, in 1886. In actuality, the drink was born very much of its time and culture, as a patent medicine in which the cocaine content of the coca leaves used is estimated to have left anyone supping on five straight glasses ingesting as much as 40 milligrams of the drug, compared to a "dose" snorted on the street today of 20 to 30 milligrams.

Pendergrast is particularly good on the formidably tangled webs of that early history - the settling of the eventual recipe (a mixture of expedience and legality), the power shifts that eventually gave birth to the two all-powerful father-figures of the Company in Asa Chandler and Robert Woodruff, and the gradual infestation of Coca-Cola as the soft-drink of world-wide choice. And bottling.

Especially bottling.

Unforeseen at the time, Asa Chandler's almost casual 1899 signing of a 600-word contract to lawyers Thomas and Whitehead to bottle the new drink runs like an unhealed sore throughout this book. In essence Chandler, dismissive of the pair's chances of success - "don't come back to cry on my shoulder" - signed away bottling rights in perpetuity, which would lead The Company into untold court-action and expense for years to come.

Coca-Cola's expansionist vision, driven by a team of head-strong (and often eminently unlikeable) Company men and advertising coups (consider for a moment why Father Christmas wears Company red - Coca-Cola has the power even to bend myth) is as terrifying as it is appreciable. The Company remained (and remains) essentially conservative, essentially patriotic. Witness the extraordinary tales of Coca-Cola at war - the way in which the front-line, even as it liberated the world from Nazi oppression, was trailed by so-called Technical Observers and their mobile bottling plants to keep the fighting boys well stocked with their favourite soft-drink. They were, Pendergrast tells us, to all intents and purposes a highly mobile form of Yankee Royalty. But witness also the remarkable story of the German Max Keith and his attempts to preserve the name of Coca-Cola even in the white heat of Nazism.

Woodruff himself was a good friend of that infamous cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover and noticeably little friend to Civil Rights or communism. Indeed, despite the market potential - and with it the potential profits - The Company's anticommunist stance kept it away from the old Soviet Block as a matter of principle; principles that did not so much extend to somewhere like Nicaragua, where Contra-terrorist kingpin Adolfo Calero was also a major Coca-Cola bottler. At the time of economic sanctions against South Africa The Company pumped money into black causes and college funds, effectively masking its unwillingness to de-invest and lose a such a lucrative market. The Atlanta-based Company's traditional loyalties to the Democrats have, unsurprisingly, been no less flexible.

And no less odd are the results of the now infamous 1985 attempt to change the Holy Grail of soft-drinks as a weapon in the vicious war against the grand pretender, Pepsi. The tidal-wave of verbal violence that greeted the rushed launch of New Coke dumbfounded almost everyone involved, leading to unprecedented front-page news and the reintroduction (as Classic) of the old formula. That The Company somehow turned the whole enterprise into a marketing coup should astound no-one.

For God, Country and Coca-Cola is, not unexpectedly, the unauthorised history of The Company. Excised to their profoundly narrowed world-view, this monstrous 556 page slab of social history would weigh-in as little more than a flimsy pamphlet, and one no doubt well-padded with photographs. That Pendergrast located and printed the sacred, famously guarded "7X" recipe (Oils of Orange, Nutmeg, Coriander, Neroli and the rest) is more than enough to see him excluded from The Company family. But as a Company executive points out at the end, the drink itself is really only a very small part of the Coca-Cola genius. 1 part sugar-water fizz, 9 parts myth.

This is an astonishing epic of the Twentieth Century. A fascinating, near-essential one hundred year blend of history and anecdote, back-room dealing and global marketing genius. And as the author makes ominously clear, with the Olympics hitting Coke's hometown in 1996, this is one story set to run and run.