Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This book is a well-written account of theories, guesses, untested assumptions, and findings relevant to the problem of how persons react in encounters with unfamiliar cultures and environs. Furnham (University College, London) and Bochner (University of New South Wales, Sydney) champion a view of intercultural adaptation based on the learning of culturally appropriate ``social skills,'' but are evenhanded in their descriptions of other theories and training techniques. They provide useful summaries of the literature on different sorts of traveler, hence they can discuss culture shock and its determinants in relation to the different experiences of refugees, international exchange students, tourists, and so forth. Although the authors only reach guarded conclusions, they bring out implications of existing research so clearly that their work should be a standard reference for many years. Recommended for all academic readers.-J. Kirkpatrick, Nomos Institute

Kirkus Book Review

A stultifyingly complete, conscientious look at the professional literature on the problems of aliens in new environments. Furnham and Bochner have cited so many studies in their text that their own book will no doubt be the first stop of those in search of a bibliographical reference. But the well-nigh unreadable academic double-speak here (the kind that announces what a chapter will be about, gives the chapter, then describes in a conclusion what the chapter has said) seems particularly obtuse when the authors are not concluding much. They describe the difficulty of their study, and the necessity of ""teasing"" conclusions out of the material. The basic conclusions reached are that all travel is stressful to some degree because the stranger has not learned the cultural codes of his new country and does not know how to act. To arrive at these common-sense assumptions, the reader must wade through mushy generalizations like ""Tourism has been a vast multinational enterprise that is the backbone of many a country's economy."" Recommended only to professionals who cannot escape the responsibility of reading it. Others will bewail the waste of a catchy title. Exhaustive bibliographies make it valuable for academic libraries, though. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.