The theoretical insight that drives this ethnography is that it is not only one's neighbors who shape one's life chances, but also organizations and other large structures. The blurbers on the back cover seem to regard this as a breakthrough insight, but it is a familiar idea in sociology. Indeed, it is not clear to me why Maxwell expends so much energy working through Chicago school ethnographic theory from 100 years ago, rather than the more recent (and much more relevant) work on the impact of NGOs around the world. The virtues of the book are more in the ethnographic details that Maxwell explores, focused on four topics--housing, politics, work, and the impact of participation. Her discussion helps clarify the way communities, working with organizations, have been somewhat able to shape their prospects. For example, in the housing chapter she describes efforts to purchase cooperative housing, and struggle with the city over whether new public housing units will go to the Satmir Hassidic community or to Latinos. In the chapter on politics, she contrasts a patronage machine, the Ridgewood-Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, whose existence and projects are intimately tied to the political strategy of its founder, with Saint Barbara's Catholic Church, which participates in an Alinskyite coalition created by the Industrial Areas Foundation. She is much more positive about the latter, because of its supposed politics of a broad public good, than the former. In this she conforms to a current uncritical attitude towards the IAF among academics. Outside academia, many resent these 'coalitions', since they usually become an obstacle to other coalitions, because the IAF is adamantly opposed to organizing around ostensively divisive issues like race and immigration, and because the Alinskyite philosophy of addressing solvable problems systematically avoids thinking about bigger questions. Far from being an ideal mobilizer of citizen participation, the IAF tends to reify the patriarchal leadership of churches. The absence of even airing these critiques, as opposed to the somewhat sardonic take on the patronage politics of Bushwick-Ridgewood is all the more striking since in this particular case the IAF church doesn't appear to be accomplishing much, while Bushwick-Ridgewood serves thousands of people in the neighborhood. Nevertheless, I hasten to add that this chapter does a good job of portraying the dynamics of these organizations in their locale. The chapter on work shows how community-based organizations have worked to get people paid work, often as care-givers within family networks, or as workers within these organizations. These are admirable efforts, and learning about them is something of an antidote to the Nickel and Dimed approach, which portrays former welfare recipients as entirely on their own. But one has to wonder about the long term prospects of such jobs for securing family betterment. Finally, the chapter on organizational participation empathetically describes the dynamics within religious small groups, and also goes into some detail about how an organization resolved tensions in the course of a leadership transition. Overall, I found this book quite stimulating, and although the theoretical optic did not strike me as wildly innovative, the ethnographic focus on organizations seemed fresh, given the long shadow questions of 'deviance' casts over most American urban ethnographies. I think the book could have been strengthened by a complimentary chapter with a more wide-angle focus that illuminated the historical role of CBDs (only briefly touched on) and the prospects for them to play a role in city-wide (or even national or global) transformation.