I liked this book. I want to make this clear at the outset, for any who may choose not to read further. Understanding Global Cultures is not, however, the sort of book I read from front-to-back. I started by reading the chapters on the British (the metaphor of the solid, well constructed house), the Irish (the metaphor of the conversation), the United States (the metaphor of professional 'American' or 'grid-iron' football) and the Chinese (the metaphor of the family alter), four cultures with which I have had some experience. My impression was that these represented vignettes of the three cultures rather than comprehensive summaries, an impression in keeping with the rich imagery of the metaphors.A metaphor, as a means of describing something, is just a bit less focused, a bit more indirect, and yet, perhaps, an informationally richer means of conveying an idea than a more empirically-based definition. As such, the use of metaphors to provide summary descriptions of social cultures is certainly appealing ... a tempting path, one might say.The risk in using cultural metaphors, however, is that such rich, unfocused descriptions may be subject to a variety of interpretations. Indeed, the imagery of the metaphor provides both the appeal of this approach to describing a culture, by providing something very much like a video of a culture's artifacts, and the risk of this approach, by creating in the reader an unrealistic sense of familiarity with a culture by comparing it with things that may already be familiar (gardens, opera, wine making).Gannon and his co-authors, as the subtitle suggests, take the reader on a