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

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 these portraits is Bissinger's lament for the gritty, industrial Philadelphia of yore. These ruminations are single-minded and tiresome -- at one point, Bissinger wastes half a page listing nearly every ship built at the naval yard. Punctuated as it is with cliches and pretentiousness, Prayer is as an odd mixture of engaging political history and dreary nostalgia.

The political history starts early. At college, Rendell was a fraternity goof-off and academic underachiever. Once, on a double date, he offered his friend three Peter Paul Mounds bars to switch dates. The fellow agreed, and Rendell's newly-bought girl ended up as his wife. After law school he became an effective and popular district attorney, but two poorly run campaigns sunk his primary bids for governor and, the first time, for mayor. Considered a political has-been by 1991, an invigorated Rendell beat the odds and won the mayoralty. The key to the victory -- and, as it turned out, to almost everything else -- was Cohen, a Harvard Law phenom dubbed "the billing king" by his law colleagues. (He returned to private practice a year ago) Cohen was Rendell's political strategizer, media spinner, and intimate. Always disciplined and tactful, he kept the mayor on message and on time.

Rendell had no honeymoon. After inauguration, Cohen calculated that the city's five-year budget gap was larger than the entire budget of Boston, Houston, or Baltimore. Rendell knew another tax raise would hurt the city as much as bankruptcy would, so he had no choice but to strike a hard bargain with the unions -- a Philadelphia bulwark. Union fat was waiting to be cut. At Philadelphia Airport, for instance, it literally used to take three people to change a light bulb -- a mechanic to remove the cover, an electrician to replace the bulb, and a custodian to sweep up the debris. With iron-clad job security and salary hikes out-pacing inflation, municipal employees were among the most coddled in the nation. Rendell staked his career on the showdown. After months of injunctions, court delays, union vandalism, and a short strike, the union blinked. Just months into his first term, Rendell balanced the budget.

But the mayor's identity has largely become that of corporate cheerleader. One of his worst publicity snafus was skipping a neighborhood meeting on violent crime in order to read a proclamation for "Hot Dog Day" at City Hall -- accompanied by a six-foot pig. Attending the meeting would not have solved much of substance, admits Bissinger, and Hatfield Quality Meats did contribute 5,000 to the city recreation department in exchange for "Hot Dog Day." A pragmatist more than a sentimentalist, Rendell sees corporate cheerleading as the next best thing to giving up. His valiant, albeit unsuccessful attempt to save the naval yard is emblematic of this approach -- with a desperate Cohen even making an unannounced, 11th-hour flight to Bremen to court a German investor. "I can suck up as good as anyone on Earth," he reminds Cohen over the phone. "That may be the best thing we've learned in my years on the job."

Rendell's story says much about the possibilities and limitations of city government. When Bissinger's narrative leaves the confines of City Hall, however, his reach exceeds his grasp. His lengthy profiles of "ordinary" Philadelphia heroes seem obligatory, and his prose is often flat and cliche-ridden -- reminiscent of mediocre newspaper writing, not of a sweeping urban history, as the book aspires to be. Bissinger is awash in nostalgia for Old Philly. Not unreasonably, he sees Rendell as its last, best hope.

Michael Brus is a student at the University of Pennsylvania.