Book Review: <i>The Ethics of Care: Moral Knowledge, Communication, </i><i>and the Art of Caregiving</i> by Alan Blum & Stuart J Murray (Eds.)

<p dir="ltr">Alan Blum and Stuart J. Murray’s 2017 volume, <i>The Ethics of Care</i>, may seem an odd title to review in the <i>Canadian Journal of Communication</i>. More than a contribution to research on caregiving for those who work in the field or a text for those who view health communication through a narrow lens that only considers interpersonal communication around death, <i>The Ethics of Care</i> challenges readers from a variety of backgrounds to consider what is at stake regarding communication at the end of life. These stakes are important for each of us, of course, and not only because the end of life is a certainty we all face, but also because, as a problem for communication and culture, end-of-life tensions reveal a lot about the institutions and structures of care; how informed consent is defined and articulated; who has the power to represent and communicate the end of life for whom; how the end of life is represented in media and elsewhere and with what effects; and so on. <i>The Ethics of Care</i> may seem to be a cluster of disparate chapters addressing the end of life, but Blum and Murray weave them together masterfully with the Introduction and Afterword in order to show how critical perspectives of institutions, ethics, and care can come together to inform health communication. They also touch on a perspective that Charlene Elliot (2014) has called “communication and health,” which asks what tools a distinctly communication approach might contribute to thinking about health topics. <i>The Ethics of Care</i> opens the door to exploring how a communication perspective can supplement and come into conversation with other disciplines that focus on end-of-life care. In this, the book is quite instructive.</p>