Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas, Business Book Review Column.(Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News)

Dec. 4--DRUNK ON SUCCESS HOW A SWEDE SOLD A BOTTLE BEFORE HE HAD ANYTHING TO PUT IN IT:

ABSOLUT Biography of a Bottle

By Carl Hamilton

Texere, 309 pages, $24.95

A business book shouldn't be as much fun to read as Carl Hamilton's witty and informative narrative of the coming to America two decades ago of what is today one of this country's most popular alcoholic beverages, Absolut vodka.

In "Absolut: Biography of a Bottle," Hamilton delivers an arresting account of the evolution of Swedish adman Gunnar Broman's oddball conception of a vessel to contain a then nonexistent beverage and how he turned it into a major export-import connection between Sweden and the United States.

Hamilton makes it clear that before there …