Beginning practitioners will appreciate Lesser and Pope's special attention to contemporary practice issues and populations, including military, immigrant and GLBT clients, multi-stressed families, and global issues at the micro and macro levels of practice. The most salient strengths of this text are: discussion of sophisticated clinical concepts in a reader friendly style; presentation of an integrating framework for understanding human behavior throughout the life cycle, that incorporates ecosystemic principles with post-modern perspectives (for example, multi cultural competence, social constructivism and world view, a social justice orientation for clinical practice, spirituality and so forth) a practical approach that illuminates complex theoretical concepts with examples drawn from the authorsrs" broad range of experiences in multi-level clinical practice and research. inclusion of cutting edge research in such contemporary areas of interest as the neurobiological underpinnings of human behavior, trauma , identity development( especially as it is affected by sexual orientation, gender, social class, race and ethnicity), community based, culturally competent clinical practice, the spiritual dimensions of development and practice; developmental contextualism, disability and chronic illness and social welfare policy throughout the life cycle. an over arching tone of inclusiveness that honors the diversity of the human experience, "normalizing" the experiences of marginalized groups Finally, the text fully integrates the multiple dimensions of human behavior. and levels of social work practice, first by providing separate chapters on neurobiological, psychological and spiritual theories of individual development, and on small group , family, organizational and community theory. These mulit-level concepts are then, woven through the second part of the text, which examines human behavior throughout the life cycle from a developmental contextual perspective.