We’ll Buy It : FOR GOD, COUNTRY AND COCA-COLA: The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It, <i> By Mark Pendergrast (Scribner’s: $27.50; 425 pp.)</i>

In Raymond Chandler’s “The Little Sister,” Philip Marlowe sneered, “There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. . . . There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.” It’s a nice turn of language, but in the something-out-of-nothing sweepstakes, neon is a distant finisher to a sweet, brown, fizzy beverage that at once represents the best and worst of American business enterprise.

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s truly nonessential products brilliantly marketed, as Mark Pendergrast writes in his detailed and marvelously entertaining history of the company that makes it and the men who have run that company. It has made thousands of people rich--bottlers, shareholders, company executives--not, however, its inventor. The drink started out as one of many patent medicines cooked up by an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton. Compared to his Phospho Lemonade & Phospho Ironade, Coca-Cola was a modest success, probably because Pemberton, attempting to break his morphine addiction by substituting cocaine in his personal pharmacological diet, used a small quantity of coca leaf in the drink, and advertised that fact: His ads said the beverage “contains the Tonic and Nerve Stimulant properties of the Coca plant.”

Pemberton’s ill health caused him to sell Coca-Cola, and another Atlanta druggist, Asa Candler, picked it up as just one of many elixirs to which he bought the rights. Coca-Cola’s increasing popularity seems to have been in part a reaction to Candler’s promotion of the combination of two ingredients, caffeine and cocaine. Pendergrast has tracked down an old formula calling for 10 pounds of coca leaf in each 36 gallons of syrup, which he says translates to .13 grain of cocaine per drink, or 8.45 milligrams, compared to today’s “street snort” of 20 to 30 milligrams. Quoting a scientist who says there is evidence that “caffeine primes brain systems--it increases the effects of cocaine,” the author writes that someone drinking five glasses of Coca-Cola in one sitting at a 1900 soda fountain received the equivalent of 40 milligrams of cocaine.

Candler was smart, or lucky, enough to foresee the growing social and legal antipathy toward cocaine, and he removed the untreated coca leaf from Coca-Cola before the drug was made illegal. That left him with the problem of finding another reason for people to drink it; his stroke of genius was to promote the drink as a “delicious and refreshing” way to enjoy a leisure moment--hardly an earthshaking notion today, but quite something in those Victorian times.

That idea gave Coca-Cola the astounding success it still enjoys, although Candler was finally moved to sell the company when he tired of what he saw as government persecution: The Feds accused him of selling an adulterated and misbranded product--adulterated by caffeine, misbranded because, Pendergrast writes, “it did not in fact have the whole coca leaf in it (i.e., cocaine was removed) and it had only an infinitesimal amount of kola nut . . . ironic . . . because if the drink had contained cocaine, it would have been illegal as well.”

In 1919, Candler sold out to a syndicate headed by Ernest Woodruff, who turned the company over to his son Robert four years later. Pendergrast labels the 1920s the company’s “Golden Age.” It completely dominated the soft-drink business, and its advertising, under the supervision of one Archie Lee, created a mythic picture of America in which handsome men and beautiful women enjoyed their favorite drink.

But Coca-Cola was, always, a business, and while its executives argue the essentially benevolent nature of wishing only to sell a harmless drink to all people, whatever their ethnicity or politics, Pendergrast does not shy from writing about the racism practiced on Woodruff’s estate (although by the 1960s, Woodruff pushed for integration in Atlanta). The book also reveals that the German bottler of Coca-Cola stayed in business throughout Hitler’s regime, and when the war interrupted its supply of Coca-Cola syrup, the bottler created a fruit-flavored drink, Fanta, which is still in production.

During World War II the U.S. military allowed Coke bottling plants to be set up wherever U.S. troops were stationed, which created a world-wide distribution system. The popularity of the drink extended even to the Soviets. Pendergrast discovered that Dwight Eisenhower introduced the drink to his new friend, Russian Marshal Zhukov, who adored it, but knew he could not be seen drinking “an American imperialist symbol.” So the obliging local Coke man in Austria found a chemist to take out the caramel coloring, bottling the result in a “special straight, clear bottle and a white cap with a red star in the middle.” This “White Coke for Red Russians” was never delayed by Russian border guards.

While I can imagine a casual reader might find the notion of reading 384 pages about Coca-Cola (including, recently, its epic battles with Pepsi) a little heavy on the intellectual digestive tract, you can blast your way past the intricate details of fights between the parent company and its bottlers to savor the contrasting passions it has engendered. One Japanese waitress described the flavor as “the sweet and bitter taste of first love”; while in Latin America union organizers, protesting the murder of union members who worked for the local bottler, altered point-of-purchase signs to read “Coca-Cola: La Chispa de la Muerta” (“The Sparkle of Death”).

And then there is the matter of the introduction of “New Coke.” It is worth the price of the book to read what happened when Roberto Goizueta, the chairman of Coca-Cola, went to the aged, ailing Robert Woodruff to tell him of the plan to change the sacred formula for Coke, so that it could hold its own in taste-test comparisons with Pepsi.

Speaking of that formula: It’s locked in a vault, known to only two or three employees at once, who never travel on the same plane. Pendergrast has it , too, in an appendix--the perfect ending to a book as substantial and satisfying as its subject is (at least in nutritional terms) inconsequential.