A Prayer for the City: The True Story of a Mayor and Five Heroes in a Race Against Time.

• Author: Brus, Michael

Ed Rendell is a likable man. His impulsiveness, eternal optimism, and political dexterity have won him more popularity and better press than perhaps any other Philadelphia mayor. Along with his sidekick, chief of staff, and uber-administrator David Cohen, Rendell has stared down the unions, saved Philadelphia from bankruptcy, and enticed countless developers to build their malls and hotels in Center City rather than in the suburbs. His manic enthusiasm is legendary, as is his temper -- he has assaulted a reporter on two separate occasions, and propositioned another while on the record. All of this is forgiven by Philadelphians, who see "Fast Eddie" as their irrepressible advocate. Rendell's aides, Buzz Bissinger writes in A Prayer for the City, see him not as a politician so much as "a big kid having the time of his life"

But whatever good may come of Rendell's efforts, they may all be for naught, Bissinger laments. Despite his unstinting admiration for the mayor and his political miracles, Bissinger duly notes that middle-class jobs and middle-class taxpayers continue to leave the city. Since 1990, he writes, Philadelphia has lost more residents than any other city in the country. Meanwhile, the city grows poorer, with almost a third of its residents now living below the poverty line.

Still, Rendell makes a thrilling -- and sometimes edifying -- subject for a book. Written with exclusive access to both the mayor and Cohen, A Prayer for the City is partly the "inside story" of the Rendell administration's first term and partly an elegy to a dying industrial city. The "five heroes" of the subtitle are Cohen and four other Philadelphia residents -- a black victim of the ghetto, a white victim of naval-yard layoffs, and two middle-class city employees who reluctantly quit their jobs and move to the suburbs.

Prayer works best when it draws on its access to Rendell and Cohen. The impulsive pol and precise, punctual chief of staff are the yin and yang of the mayor's office, one handling the rhetoric, the other the details. They are the protagonists in a never-ending political crisis -- first the budget, then racial crimes, then the closing of the naval yard, and so on. Unfortunately, this narrative is interrupted by portraits of the other "heroes" Not only have we heard their tales before, these four people seem chosen solely to embody demographic trends -- white flight, blue-collar job insecurity, and black family breakdown. Interspersed with...