International Journal of Communication 8 (2014), Book Review 1921–1923 1932–8036/2014BKR0009 Copyright © 2014 (Aimei Yang, aimei.yang@usc.edu). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. Krishnamurthy Sriramesh and Dejan Vercic (Eds.), The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013, 992 pp, $93.40 (paperback). Reviewed by Aimei Yang University of Southern California Public relations is a relatively new academic field and most research in this field has been dominated by a Western perspective. Since the early 1990s, research such as the “Excellence” studies has made a continued effort to identify and theorize Western excellence models. Many prominent scholars have argued excellence models should be promoted and are applicable worldwide even though the field has little knowledge about how public relations is practiced in non-Western contexts (Grunig, 1992). Within this tradition, The Global Public Relations Handbook (2nd edition) is a remarkable effort to counterbalance “the existing ethnocentricity in public relations” (p. 919) and to challenge the assumption that public relations in other countries, especially Western Europe and Asia, is “no more than a copy of the Anglo-American approach” (van Ruler and Vercic, 2004, p. 149). The book, composed of 43 chapters, presents a multinational, multicultural description of how public relations is practiced across the world. I would advise readers to start with section one, “Global Public Relations: Conceptual Framework,” which provides a framework to discuss how the public relations practice is conditioned by political systems and activism, economic development, and localized culture and media environments in different nations. This section is important because most subsequent chapters apply this framework to examine specific cases from various countries and regions. This framework provides the readers with a consistent context within which comparisons can be made across nations. Once readers familiarize themselves with the framework, they can easily navigate the rest of the book. This handbook represents a massive, far-reaching editorial effort and includes case studies from 30 nations and four major regions (Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas). An important feature of the handbook is that many chapters are written by scholars native to those countries. Despite the fact that many of the authors have a Western education, this editorial choice is an important development in international public relations. This is because many international public relations studies and introductions have been written by visiting American scholars, whose acquaintance with the region in question is often brief and their local contacts limited. And, indeed, in the handbook these authors’ native knowledge about their countries does shine through in some chapters. For example, Badran, VanSlyke Turk, and Walters’ chapter on public relations in the United Arab Emirates shows that a working knowledge of the laws, customs, taboos, and ethics of the region should be a requisite for practitioners. Kim’s chapter on the evolution of professionalism in South Korea adds a fresh look at how family chief orientation and Confucian worldview affects public relations.