John I. Gilderbloom and R. L. Mullins, Jr., Promise and Betrayal: Universities and the Battle for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

This book chronicles the ten-year history of the University of Louisville’s involvement in community partnerships. It is about a comprehensive neighborhood revitalization effort in one of the poorest and roughest parts of that city. A distinguishing factor of this effort is that this community—the Russell Neighborhood—is not adjacent to the university campus and that this collaboration is therefore not a grudgingly necessary university attempt to improve the environment surrounding the university for recruiting purposes. Instead, it has been a genuine attempt to rebuild, reclaim, and revitalize a poor black neighborhood through two major, comprehensive programs: the Housing and Urban Development Strategies (HANDS) program, largely funded through a U.S. Department of Education Urban Community Service grant, and the Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods (SUN) program, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development through a Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) grant. John Gilderbloom, the book’s primary author, led both programs. While his involvement gives depth to the analysis of the programs and its achievements, his overly positive portrayal of his own involvement undercuts the objectivity of the book. Promise and Betrayal consists of seven chapters. The first describes the roles a university can play within the community, that is, as a facilitator, as an equity partner, and as a technical resource. Unfortunately, Gilderbloom and Mullins describe only a few of the Urban Community Service and COPC grants awarded in the 1990s. A table of the considerable number of community partnership and/or improvement programs that have been attempted by universities nationwide over the last 15 years would have been extremely enlightening and put Louisville’s substantial accomplishments in better context. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a thorough discussion of the HANDS and SUN programs including the objectives of each program, how each operated, what each accomplished, and the various difficulties each experienced. Unfortunately, the graphics are very poor, and the authors fail to include a map indicating the location of census tracts. A table dealing with crime statistics is not at all helpful, because it is barely mentioned in the text. The seven-page table on HANDS’s goals and accomplishments should have been placed in an appendix and printed in a more easily readable format (the appendix containing 28 pages of congratulatory correspondence to Gilderbloom on his programs’ successes should have been dropped, because it is too self-serving). The discussion would have been easier to follow had the authors included both an organization chart and a flow chart covering all the projects and activities, as well as a time line. Chapter 4, an evaluation of the the HANDS program based on interviews with staff from the public, private, nonprofit, and university sectors, helps in illuminating why universities should get involved in community partnerships, who should be responsible