Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1964-1994.

• Author: Feldstein, Mark

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Two years after he emerged from a federal penitentiary, Marion Barry is back. Decked out in African regalia, with a new wife at his side--his fourth, who is, like his second, a convicted felon--the former mayor plots his political comeback. From the D.C. Council he holds forth in his endless quest for respectability.

In their new book on the Barry era, Dream City, Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood remind us of how much damage Barry did to his adopted city, and especially to the poor he claimed to champion. Sherwood, who has covered him for nearly 20 years, first at The Washington Post and then at WRC-TV, and Jaffe, a writer for Washingtonian magazine, provide the first comprehensive political history of both the former mayor and the District of Columbia.

Along the way, the authors dish out some juicy tidbits. According to the book, Barry's own lawyer, Herbert Reid, said privately of the mayor, "If it walks, Marion fucks it. If it doesn't, he ingests it." Dream City is filled with stories suggesting Reid understood his client well. Once, Barry's second wife apparently got so tired of Barry's philandering that she put a pistol to his head, saying "Nigger, I'm tired of this shit. I'm gonna blow your fucking brains out."

But Dream City is more than a compilation of Barry's tawdry exploits. It is also a history of local Washington--black Washington-and its forgotten pain. The book weaves back and forth between the history of the city and the rise and fall of Barry, arguing that "Barry's descent... eerily mirrored the city's own decline." It's a compelling metaphor, but the authors never develop it, apparently unable to decide whether Barry's Washington is uniquely flawed or the victim of problems that afflict all of urban America.

The book's strength is the simple and real human drama of its story. It follows the "Chicken Express," the railroad cars that brought blacks north during the great migration from the South after World War II. Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, Marion Barry was part of that migration. He began his life picking cotton in the Delta just as his slave ancestors did. He wore cardboard shoes. He never knew his father.

Barry's journey north took him first into the civil rights movement in Tennessee. About this time, his first wife divorced him, saying he "disappeared" and left her "impoverished." But Barry moved on. He adopted "Shepilov" as his middle name, after a Soviet propagandist. He became the first head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, although his colleagues there say Barry ducked the Freedom Rides. In any case, political liberation became personal liberation for Barry, and he channelled his inchoate rage in a way that gave his life purpose.

In 1965, Barry moved to Washington and took over...