Readers of this book are given sound advice to ‘understand the ideology, theory base, values … associated with … teachers' (p. 92). Eagleton (1976) has pointed out that the ideological content of any text is to be found as much in what is not said as in what is. Gamble and Weil teach social work, and their ideology is evidence in this book's title: its focus is certainly on skills, but ‘community practice’ applies only to the narrow scope of social workers in the United States. The ‘perspectives’ of the subtitle, far from ‘local to global’, are distinctly US orientated. Whilst there are case studies from outside the United States, many of them very interesting, they are selected to make a point for American social work students and interpreted from a particularly narrow US perspective. ‘Social work’, a term with varying meanings in different countries, from the highly professionalized to the grassroot activist and from casework to collective mobilization, is used here in its US context, albeit with reference to the International Federation of Social Workers. The literature cited is almost entirely North American: for example major British-based writers on community work are absent. Theorists from the global South are pitifully represented only by the superstars popularly recognized in the west: Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai and Nelson Mandela. If the publishers had called this ‘Community Practice skills for US social workers’, it would have been more accurate, although the ideological implications are not so much its American focus, but rather the assumed superiority of American liberalism.