Abstract
Several weeks ago, I sent a book for review to Hawaii, and a couple of days later, the book was returned with a note asking me to first fill out a Customs form. Apparently, someone in some mailroom somewhere thought America’s 50th state was a foreign country. I chuckled, appended a polite note, and sent the book back to the postal office. My efforts paid off because the review of that book is in this final edition of 2015.
I thought of that anecdote recently while putting together this edition of book reviews. While doing so, I noticed that many nations outside of the United States are reflected in the reviewers below. Following an outreach effort several months ago to recruit new reviewers by the new editor of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ) that cast a wide net around the globe, we now have reviewers from every corner of the world—which is certainly a good thing. Indeed, in this edition alone, eight nations outside of United States are represented in the reviews below. Those countries are Australia, Canada, Denmark, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Scotland, and Switzerland.
Given that the readers of this journal understand communications is a global and interconnected institution that flows across borders, I see no need here to ask and answer why this is a good thing. I think if you just quickly scan the titles of the many books reviewed below this note, you can quickly sense how the many subjects of these many books—whether they are specifically about particular countries or not—view communications as globally singular and uncloseted by borders. And that fact—given our shrinking and increasingly interconnected world—is certainly a good thing.
Please enjoy.