As stated in the Introduction, this edited volume aims to achieve two overlapping goals: to celebrate the diverse set of research falling under the label “language and social interaction” (LSI), and to honor the work and teachings of Robert Hopper, who died in 1998. Toward the first goal, the book begins, following the Introduction, with 32 original essays divided into 4 parts: “Orienting to the field of language and social interaction,” “Talk in everyday life,” “Talk in institutional settings,” and “Emerging trajectories: Body, mind, and spirit.” The contributors are largely researchers well known for their work in the area of conversation analysis (CA), including Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, Paul Drew, John Heritage, Anita Pomerantz, Chuck Goodwin, and Gene Lerner, but the articles also cross disciplinary borders to incorporate research on cognitive processing, gesture, speech evaluations, sociolinguistic variables (e.g., gender), and ethnography. To meet the second goal, the volume not only brings together a mixture of Hopper's former students and colleagues, but it also ends with a fifth part, titled “Robert Hopper: Teacher and scholar,” which is devoted to more personal messages about Hopper and his work, including a final chapter with his acceptance speech for the National Communication Association mentorship award. This last section of the book brings the total number of chapters to 39 and the number of pages to more than 600 (including the Index).

Part 1, “Orienting to the field of language and social interaction,” sets the cross-disciplinary tone of the book by featuring an eclectic group of articles, starting with one discussing the scope of speech evaluation research by James Bradac. There follow an analysis of questions in news interviews by Heritage, and a discussion of intercultural communication by Kristine Fitch. In the Introduction, the editors account for the inclusion of various approaches by stressing that they are writing from the field of communication; when put together in one volume, the different disciplines attest to the progress made within that field in the past three decades. As the editors note, this diverse base of work has been crucial in pushing communication studies away from outdated models, most notably the sender-receiver model, and toward a “social constructionist or constitutive view” of communication.

However, even though the editors are quick to note that the disciplines touched on in the book constitute “an array of assumptions, methods, and topics” that are sometimes connected by no more than “family resemblances,” Hopper's own writings suggest potential difficulties in the attempt to bring these diverse approaches together. Consider, for example, his mostly negative reaction (Hopper 1990/1991) to Michael Moerman's book Talking culture (1988), which endeavors to integrate conversation analysis with ethnography. Hopper expressed his belief that the book constructed only a “fragile bridge” between CA and ethnography and questioned Moerman's understanding of CA, particularly its approach to context. In response to the assertion by Moerman that conversation analysts need ethnography to help them understand the context surrounding social interaction, Hopper emphasized the belief within CA that analysts should focus only on those details of interaction oriented to by the participants themselves. Analysts looking to move from the talk into the surrounding context in order to explain interactional phenomena are often forced to make decisions about what they, not necessarily the participants, deem to be relevant to the interaction. As Hopper (1990/1991:163) asked, after noting the seemingly limitless features that might qualify as background context to any episode of interaction, “How can an analyst select from such a bewildering list those aspects of ‘context’ most likely to be relevant?” Although more than 10 years has passed since Hopper asked this question in print, context remains a hotly debated topic within the social sciences, especially within disciplines closely related to communication (e.g., Schegloff 1997, Wetherell 1998, Billig 1999).

Yet, while the book begs questions about the treatment of context, placing too much emphasis on differences among the contributors' approaches risks underestimating the wide research interests of Hopper. The impressive list of his works crosses many disciplines, including speech evaluation and ethnography. Most of the chapters in the volume do not dig at and pursue past points of difference, but rather look more to the future as they build on Hopper's insights in order to underscore the vast potential of the field of communication. In particular, Part 3, “Talk in institutional settings,” provides interesting, if not provocative, suggestions concerning the possible application of communication research in professional contexts. For example, the contribution by Pomerantz considers the use of naturally recorded data for assessing the benefits and drawbacks of employing a particular teaching strategy, referred to as “modeling,” in clinical training sessions. A chapter coauthored by Jennifer Molloy & Howard Giles provides ideas for employing “intergroup theories of communication” to improve the relationship between police and other citizens, and a chapter by Kurt Bruder describes prescriptive uses of discourse analytic concepts and practices in a therapeutic setting. Though Drew's contribution in this section does not necessarily describe a professional application, it offers a “sketch” of what might be involved in a comparative analysis of talk across institutional settings.

Drew's use of the term “sketch” to describe his contribution highlights another overarching feature of the volume. Instead of in-depth analyses, most of the chapters present relatively brief descriptions of specific communicative phenomena or possible applications of research. Schegloff, for instance, has two contributions in the book, in Part 2 and Part 4, which add up to fewer than 30 pages. The latter chapter focuses on a phenomenon he terms “ESP puns,” characterized as a “fringe” possibility for gaining further knowledge about the “mysterious” domain of word selection. As is the case with most of the other chapters, Schegloff's discussion of ESP puns, rather than serving as a definitive statement on the topic, is meant to provide hints for gaining deeper insights into an important but not yet understood aspect of communication. In a similar vein, Jefferson uses her contribution (in Part 2) to “take a shot” at describing a particular phenomenon – participants' attempts to disambiguate their own statements without doing so explicitly – that she has been tracking for more than 20 years. Despite modestly claiming that she still does not have a “handle” on the practice, Jefferson uses her space (fewer than 20 pages) to present and discuss a number of candidate cases.

For some academics, the book's emphasis on shorter articles that tend to express ideas in the process of being developed rather than in-depth analyses might induce dissatisfaction. At the same time, however, the contributions in this volume may be viewed as a welcome source of inspiration. After all, except for a handful of lucky students and colleagues, not many researchers regularly have the opportunity to “hear” developing ideas from scholars such as Schegloff, Jefferson, and Drew, not to mention the numerous other distinguished contributors. The short remembrances of Hopper in the last section may not interest all readers, but researchers searching for innovative applications of LSI methods and research and graduate students in need of ideas for thesis and dissertation topics will certainly have much to gain from a thorough reading of this volume.

There is one aspect of communication I was hoping to see discussed more in the book: the relationship of gender to communication. Gender was one topic that Hopper focused on in his later writings (Hopper 2002, Hopper & LeBaron 1998), and the book does recognize this with two articles in Part 2: a discussion by Phillip Glenn of the relationship of laughter to sex categories and sexuality on a call-in radio show, and a short analysis by Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra concerning gender and cultural differences in telephone openings. Hopper predominantly adopted a CA approach to gender as he used his work to demonstrate some of the practices used by participants to make gender relevant to interaction. In this respect, it is Glenn who most closely follows Hopper by skillfully describing how the participants on the radio program used laughter to mark gender as a relevant feature of context.

However, despite the interest and import of Glenn's article, it should be noted that recent research on gender and social interaction, in addition to demonstrating participants' means of orienting to gender, has begun exploring innovative ways of employing CA to promote insights into the positions of women and men in society (e.g., Kitzinger 2000a, Stokoe & Weatherall 2002, Ohara & Saft 2003). Making use of both sequential CA and membership categorization analysis, this research is presenting interactional perspectives on difficult topics such as sexual harassment (Kitzinger & Frith 1999), breast cancer (Kitzinger 2000b), and care for the elderly and disabled (Paoletti 2002). Given that many of the authors of these recent studies refer to and claim to build on Hopper's work, it would have been possible to include an example of this research and still maintain the celebratory nature of the book. To be sure, even with approximately 600 pages of text, it is impossible to cover fully the many directions of LSI research and even all of the diverse interests embraced by Hopper himself. Needless to say, this one point of criticism does not detract from the fact that this volume contains a wealth of information that will undoubtedly prove useful to people working within and around the field of communication.