I’d like to highlight an extraordinary book, now two decades old, which I’m currently working through with my public affairs classes. It’s one of those books that, in my opinion, draws conclusions so sound and far-reaching for social and political life that I’m surprised I only stumbled upon it in a secondary source chapter in teaching communication theory several years ago. W. Barnett Pearce’s Communication and the Human Condition is an opus of insights into the communicative problems that wrack our planet, surveying the academic and professional convergences that have only begun to address what types of communication might be suited to humanity’s future. Despite our incredible technological and scientific advances, Pearce outlines how our evolutionary understandings of communication have remained at woefully underdeveloped (even premodern) levels, targeting particularly deleterious forms of communication that we see in everyday life (via chapters on monocultural, ethnocentric, modernistic, and neotraditional communication). The book finishes with a call to “the practicality of cosmopolitan communication,” based in many case studies that illustrate what forms of discourse might bring out the rich diversity in our different ways of being human, while retaining the tolerant coexistence necessary to any society. Overall, I would put Communication and the Human Condition on my top five list of books outlining the mindboggling complexities of human communication and action; if understood by more practitioners across the spheres of business, government, media etc., it could almost certainly create more equitable and informed institutions and practices.