Product Review

Our Voices: Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and Communication examines intercultural communication through an array of cultural and personal perspectives, with each of its contributors writing a first-person account of his or her experiences in the real world. While most readers are collections of scholarly essays that describe intercultural communication, Our Voices presents short, student-oriented readings chosen with an eye toward engaging the reader. Collectively, the readings tackle the key areas of communication--rhetoric, mass communication, and interpersonal communication--using a uniquely expansive and humanist perspective that provides a voice to otherwise marginalized members of society. Praised by students for its abundance of short, first-person narratives, Our Voices traverses topics as diverse as queer identity, racial discourse in the United States, "survival mechanisms" in Jamaican speech, and codes of communication in nontraditional families.

Empowering and educating students in equal measure, Our Voices is an ideal reader for any intercultural communication course.