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This is a good book for anyone who deals with the public at work and anyone interested in the various ways to communicate with people from different backgrounds. This is one of those keeper book you get assigned for school and that means it is worth the money and the effort to read it. I will utilize some of the theories and methods used to improve myself at work and in life.

This is the worst textbook I've ever had to read. The concepts made sense, but then again how can you trust a book with numerous grammatical and spelling errors. I couldn't focus on reading the assigned text becuase I was too distracted fixing the errors in this book.

The book was incredibly boring and the author repeats himself constantly. He also writes with a heavy political slant. I found the book very frustrating.

Bought this book for my Global Communications grad class. My teacher apologized to us the first month of class for the book, saying she couldn't find anything better for us within the time frame she was allowed to pick her text. We don't follow the book closely; she calls the book "theory to expand upon".
As I read, I go through the text and correct the grammatical errors, run-on sentences, one-sentence paragraphs, and I cross out the irrelevant information as well. Other than the unnecessary grammar issues, I find that the author is very dry and one-note. For a communications textbook, the bulk of it is just bad writing. The few images which are included are pointless - they aren't photos, they are vector images of things such as satellites orbiting Earth.
I give it two stars because there IS some important information in the book, if you can pick it out of the rest of the junk.

I am a college student trying to get a better deal on a textbook that I need. This seller has yet to respond to any of my attempts to contact them!!! I am behind on my reading for class because I have not yet received my book!!! DO NOT buy ANYTHING from this seller...they took my money and I still need my book!!! It is very upsetting that someone would just take my money and ignores my attempts to get in contact with them!!!!

I was required to use this book as a textbook for my Global Communications class. To be blunt, the textbook was the most terrible, poorly authored and edited, and unprofessional textbook I have ever been forced to read. To calm my frustrations while reading the textbook, I listed problems with the textbook as I read. Here are a few of them, in no particular order, summarized and with commentary.

--Poor grammar/punctuation/run-on sentences: This textbook had a plethora of grammatical and other errors that greatly hindered my comprehension of the material. Every single chapter had numerous errors that made it very hard for me to read the textbook and understand the material. Some examples include: missing periods (and a new sentence had definitely begun--had it not, it would have been a run on The sentence would have looked like this.); "glocalization" instead of globalization and other various typos; improper use of words, such as "forge" on page 207; and various other errors, such as having two words that meant the same thing next to each other, but did not make sense in context--kind of like writing typing like this. It was as if there was no editor, and this was a very rough draft of the book.

--An absurd amount of abbreviations: I understand that many organizations to which the book referred had abbreviations to go along with them, but many of them were spelled out only once, and then brought back up again later in the book. Oftentimes they weren't spelled out at all, and left as abbreviations. This made it very hard to understand what was being discussed and hindered my ability to follow easily.

--Lots of material was nonspecific: The book often had vague sentences/paragraphs in it that meant nothing. For instance, "There has been a deficit between the US and EU." A deficit of what, between whom (the government?), and when? Many questions of mine were left unanswered due to this vague writing style. Also in the textbook: "It amplified it." I had no idea to what each "it" referred.

--Rambling: all the authors involved in this book rambled without reason. A great deal of content is irrelevant. With that, paragraphs jumped from topic to topic within paragraphs, seemingly without reason.

--Repetition: all of the authors repeated themselves numerous times. I understand repeating for emphasis, but the amount the authors repeated themselves was ridiculous and unnecessary.

--Very few citations: Evidence is often uncited in this book, though there are a handful of in-text citations and always a Works Cited at the end of the chapter. I don't understand why some information is specifically cited, but the rest only is referenced on the Works Cited page. Furthermore, authors seldom introduced who a scholar was before referencing them. As a reader, it was very hard for me to find what they were writing to be credible, if I have no idea what the credentials of the person who they referenced are.

--Politically-slanted: Much of the content in this book is politically slanted towards the democratic party. While I am a democrat, I found this inappropriate to be included in a textbook.

--Outdated/inconsistent dates: though this book was updated in 2010, a ridiculous amount of the information in this book is outdated and not chronological. For instance: the USIA was referenced as the public diplomacy department for the US. This has not existed since 1999. There is no reason the USIA should be noted in the textbook as the current department of public diplomacy. Furthermore, dates were often inconsistent in the textbook--one page, for instance, said an event happened in 2003, the next page said it happened in 2004. Also something to note is that nearly all events are related to the end of the Cold War. This is extremely outdated, especially seeing as the book was updated in 2010, nearly twenty years after the Cold War ended. While I understand that the Cold War had many effects on global communications, I feel that global communications has such a quick rate of change, that the Cold War is inappropriate to reference. Statistics are also often from the 1960s in this textbook. This too is inappropriate, seeing as the book was updated in 2010.

--Other wrong material: This book was littered with wrong information and words that were not words, such as "twittering," when in actuality the word is "tweeting." I would expect this mistake from a 75 year old, not a Mass Communications textbook, which should be very in tune with terminology like this.

--Other irritating habits: This book is full of irritating habits that made the textbook frustrating to read. A few select habits include: listing nearly everything in 3's (I'm sure there were more or fewer than three reasons for some events and concepts); often saying something "can be summarized"; using "basically" often; not explaining why something is "worth noting"; and saying "first," but never going onto "second."

Overall, this book was extremely frustrating and tiresome to read. Much of what I learned is outdated, irrelevant, or plainly wrong. Because of this book, I had a very hard time with the course and did not enjoy it, in the least. For these reasons and many more, I do NOT recommend this book at all.

I found "Global Communications" to be one of the most frustrating texts that I have read recently. The second edition looks as if it was put together in a hurry and by a poorly supervised research assistant. There are complete paragraphs which are now "orphaned" (for example, paragraph 1 on page 23) and internal inconsistencies within paragraphs (for example, on page 67 AOL has 6 million non-US subscribers and 9 million within a paragraph).
Even though the second edition was published in 2006, the data is already incorrect (although Chapter 1 was clearly written about six months later than any of the rest of the book). This datedness further diminishes the value of the book as the theoretical perspective is very flimsy. For example, "Thus, the concept of the United States of Europe (USE) is a valid concept". I expect a US centric view in a text written by an American, but uninformed political analysis is unforgivable.
I was surprised that Blackwell would publish such a poorly edited book. For me, it is best used to demonstrate why editing is important and that close supervision of research assistants is essential if you want your book to be used a text in other institutions.

Book came in great condition.