This book consists of 74 dialogues—brief conversations between an American and a person from another culture. In the course of each of these conversations, the speakers make comments which reveal significant differences in their values and attitudes or in how they view or understand the world around them….After reading a few dialogues, one begins to wonder if what is ‘completely natural’ to a person from one culture is all that natural to someone from a different culture.” The reader is invited to try to find the misunderstanding and its cause on their own, and then is offered an explication by the author. Designed as a teaching resource, this book can help the reader approach the challenge of successful communication.

Even within the US, we also have cultural differences that make for differing underlying communication styles, assumptions, and conversational etiquette, and so these concepts are useful even for those among us who are not traveling or working across nationalities.

(2nd edition 2017, Intercultural Press, an imprint of Nicholas Brealey Publishing).