Americans buy more bottled water than they do milk and beer – and the numbers are closing in on soda, journalist Elizabeth Royte (Garbage Land) tells readers in her latest book. Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It is an intrepid, intelligent analysis of Americans’ raging thirst for bottled water, a probe of the industry, plus the politics, trafficking and scientific analysis of our drinking water. Royte reveals the powerful agendas that drive corporations such as Nestle; (Poland Springs), Coke (Dasani) and Pepsi Co. (Aquafina) to voraciously plunder, package and sell public/municipal waters, nationally and internationally.

Taking the water fiasco in Fryeburg, Maine, as a microcosmic example, Royte shows how corporate giants commercialize and profit from what many consider a “fundamental human right” (water access); the social and environmental impacts of depleting natural water sources and of shipping water worldwide; and a close (often gross) look at the purity, processing and safety of potable water.

In sum, Royte finds that “bottled water does have its place. . . . But it’s often no better than tap water, its environmental and social price is high, and it lets our public guardians off the hook for protecting watersheds, stopping polluters, upgrading treatment and distribution infrastructure, and strengthening treatment standards.” Alison Hood still drinks tap water.

All good things must come to an end, as the saying goes even our favorite television shows. Classics from I Love Lucy to M*A*S*H to Seinfeld have their glory days on the tube and then disappear, living only in our memories (and on Nick at Nite).

Some of us with way too much time on our hands might ponder the moment at which even the best shows head south, taking a turn for the worse from which they never recover. Jon Hein and his college buddies at the University of Michigan spent many idle hours in the dorm talking about the decline of their favorite shows and coined the term jump the shark” to describe the crucial turning point at which a TV show heads downhill. The phrase comes from an episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz literally jumps over a shark while water-skiing in the Pacific.

A decade after he graduated from college and his buddies scattered, Hein created a popular Web site (jumptheshark.com), and he has now written a book that could prove addictive for avid TV watchers. Jump the Shark: When Good Things Go Bad looks at more than 60 shows (along with several new categories, ranging from sports figures to musicians) and names the precise moment when things began to slide. Some are obvious (When did Laverne ∧ Shirley jump the shark? When the girls left Milwaukee and moved to California), but many others are open to argument (Did Seinfeld really go downhill after George’s fiancŽe died from licking her wedding invitation envelopes?). Whether or not you agree with Hein’s selections, Jump the Shark is a great book for browsing and one that may prompt you to be on the lookout for an ominous fin in the water the next time you watch Sex and the City.

reporter Jennifer 8. Lee’s (the 8 connotes prosperity in Chinese) new book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, begins with a story about Powerball. In March 2005, the $84 million megalottery jackpot had generated a modest $11 million in ticket sales across 29 states, and officials anticipated three or four second-place winners and maybe one jackpot winner. Instead, there were 104 second-place winners who had selected theidentical six numbers. Where had all these winners gotten their numbers? From a fortune cookie. What started as Lee’s initial search for the fortune cookie manufacturer became a search for the fortune cookie’s history, which in turn raised questions about the origin and evolution of Chinese food in America.

With more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC restaurants combined, it’s obvious that Americans have a consuming passion for Chinese food, or more accurately phrased, Americanized Chinese food. There is no General Tso’s chicken in China. Chop suey (as we know it, anyway) was invented here. Even the beloved, fabled and ever-entertaining fortune cookie is not Chinese in origin; it’s not American either. How did these and other dishes, “ethnic” yet not too exotic, flavorful yet comforting, come to be? Lee traveled the world and conducted extensive research to find the answers and even goes so far as to identify the world’s greatest Chineserestaurant outside of China (sorry, it is not in the U.S.).

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is enjoyable and revealing, and provides insight and an education into the American and Chinese cultures; it’s also a tasty blend of thehistory and culture surrounding the rise in popularity of American Chinese food.

Ellen R. Marsden writes from Mason, Ohio.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been frightening readers for 200 years, and Susan Tyler Hitchcock explores the journey in Frankenstein: A Cultural History. Hitchcock explains the story’s lasting relevance by detailing its evolution from book to big screen (and to comics, costumes, TV shows, tea towels, etc.).

It happens about every 10 words the ums, uhs, you knows the verbal placeholders we use while our minds race ahead of our tongues, the verbal gaffes like substituting interweb for Internet or replacing loofah with falafel (as commentator Bill O’Reilly is rather famously alleged to have done in a telephone call). Armed with a master’s degree in linguistics and a doctorate in English, author Michael Erard lumps a variety of faux pas under the heading of disfluencies in Um. . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, which makes them sound more remarkable than most of them really are. Our verbal miscues are plentiful and inevitable, but only occasionally riotous or ruinous. If we’re really lucky, like the notorious Rev. William Spooner, not only will actual blunders (such as exalting God as a shoving leopard ) bring us fame, but invented ones such as a camel passing through the knee of an idol will be ascribed to us, enhancing our renown.

Viennese professor Rudolf Meringer’s famed battles with Sigmund Freud over the cause of Fehlleistung (literally faulty performance, now widely known as Freudian slips ) are documented in detail here, as is the cross-cultural nature of the vocal glitch. In the Wichita tongue, for instance, the word kaakiri, or something, takes the place of uh, and similar verbal tics can be detected even in sign language. From Mrs. Malaprop, whose penchant for garbled speech in the 1775 play The Rivals has given us the catchall word for verbal blunders, to President George W. Bush, whose so-called dubyaspeak has given rise to such howlers as 2004’s This is a historic moment in history, as far as I’m concerned, Erard deftly picks his way through a junkyard of spoken debris to inform, enlighten and entertain in equal measure.

Verbal blunderologists swarm among us like birdwatchers in spring, and we are all unwitting targets for their nets. So be forewarned: Um is a mystery you won’t want to hiss, and if you do, may sod rest your goal.

Viewers far and wide of Do You Speak American?, the television series airing this month on PBS, will be inspired to buy this companion volume in order to read it without any clothes on. Bostonians will peruse it stack naked; New Yorkers can enjoy it stock naked; and Georgians are sure to breeze through it stalk naked. The co-authors have traveled high and low in every sense of those words across the United States: up into the hills of Appalachia and the halls of ivy; Down East along the Maine coast, down into San Fernando Valley, and down, down, down, into the glorious swamp of pop lyrics. Their objective: to catalogue the unhemmed latitude of American popular speech that Walt Whitman celebrated 150 years ago as the genius of our nation. MacNeil and Cran begin their journey on a battleground of ideas, fought over by advocates of two opposing linguistic theories. The prescriptivists worry about the decline of proper English usage (and civilization along with it) in the United States. They wish to preserve fine writing and elegant speech, to uphold a morality of language in short, to prescribe to Americans how they should speak American. The descriptivists are blither spirits by far, content to look around and listen and learn how Americans are actually writing and speaking, and then report in full on those unruly goings-on.

MacNeil and Cran make it abundantly clear that, however much linguistic researchers may hope to pin down Spanglish or Ebonics, Americans (particularly minority groups) are always way ahead of them, changing the language from day to day. In the course of his interview for the PBS series (transcribed in the book), even John Simon, the most outspoken elitist critic of the American language, cannot help speaking in run-on sentences that sound deliciously low (as Henry Higgins would have remarked). This irony will probably be lost on the TV screen, but it’s stock naked on the page. Michael Alec Rose is a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.