Bully in the pulpit.

Leadership Rudolph W. Giuliani with Ken Kurson Talk Miramax Books, $25.95, 407 pp.

Two months after the World Trade Center was destroyed, Rudolph Giuliani found himself assailed by New York City firefighters who charged that their mayor had cut back on rescue operations at the disaster site. Giuliani lashed back at the firefighters' union leaders, calling their complaints "really, really sinful." He added: "And I mean that in a moral sense."

Giuliani is one of the most prominent Catholics in American civic life these days, and that exchange captured for me how steeped he is in a certain strain of Catholicism. It is not, to be sure, the Catholicism at home with the "compassion industry," his term for advocates of the poor. Although he is twice divorced and an advocate of abortion rights, it is a more judgmental strain that seems to fuse with his propensity toward righteous indignation. In the days when Giuliani was an avenging, crusading U.S. attorney in Manhattan, the late Murray Kempton caricatured him as a contemporary Savonarola.

I would like to think that Catholicism imbued Giuliani with something more than a thirst to punish evildoers, jaywalkers, and museums that exhibit offensive art--that it also gave him the faith, hope, and love he showed as he led New Yorkers back from the September 11 terrorist attack.

In his best-selling book Leadership, Giuliani hints at this, saying his parents passed down to him "the church's message of experiencing grace by giving it to others." He writes of his interest, until he turned eighteen, in joining the Montfort Fathers and serving the poor.

Even though he mentions his faith first in outlining one of his key precepts for leadership--"develop strong beliefs"--Giuliani doesn't follow through on the theme. He skates on the surface.

It's a weakness that afflicts much of the book, with the exception of compelling accounts of his response to the World Trade Center attack and his fight against prostate cancer. When he writes about a crisis, Giuliani seems to look right in the reader's eye, person to person.

Still the bulk of the book reminded me of being at one of his year-end press conferences or his release of the semi-annual "Mayor's Management Report." Giuliani has a great zeal for self-promotion, and he would indulge it fully on those occasions. Where other New York City mayors used such forums to discuss both accomplishments and failures, Giuliani said his role was to point out only his success.

Similarly, his book often lacks introspection. It offers valid, if obvious, principles for leadership ("surround yourself with great people") and goes on to show how Giuliani achieved each goal with flying colors.

I wonder, though, if Giuliani ever gave serious thought to his inability to attract more than a very few talented African Americans into his administration in a city that is one-quarter black. I wonder, too, if he was aware that some of the people he brought into high-level city jobs were afraid to speak freely with him because of his famous temper.

It would be hard to examine Giuliani as a leader without considering the fear factor. Many would-be critics were simply afraid of his hardball tactics. His attack rhetoric had the pop of a Roger Clemens fastball. He used his access to the media to belittle other public officials, activists, and people who called in to his radio show. He often attacked the integrity of judges who ruled against him, a troubling practice. He released sealed information about the unarmed victim of a police shooting. Given his vigorous use of the bully pulpit that comes with the New York City mayoralty, it amuses many Giuliani observers that one of his principles of leadership is "stand up to bullies."

Giuliani's book doesn't consider whether the tone produced by such tactics worked to his advantage as a leader. Did it deter critics or build resentment? Polls showed that while New Yorkers thought he did a good job, they were dissatisfied with Giuliani's leadership style before September 11, 2001. He replied on occasion that his style worked for him. But will it work for others?

In the book, as in his mayoralty, Giuliani is at his best in moments of crisis. His account of the World Trade Center attack is moving, not only because of the circumstances, but because of the detail he provides. He describes, for example, encountering the city's chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles Hirsch, on the afternoon of September 11. He "noticed Frankenstein-looking stitches all over the back of his hand" and found out that to avoid diverting another doctor, Hirsch had stitched his own hand after being cut by falling debris. Giuliani goes on to describe how Hirsch warned him there would be no survivors in the towers' rubble because of the 2,000-degree heat from burning jet fuel.

Some of the best passages in the book come when Giuliani analyzes others' leadership styles. He gives a perceptive account of how New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and owner George Steinbrenner led the team to a series of championships. His sense of humor (which isn't widely known) comes to play in his look at the leadership styles of John Gotti and Don Corleone.

Free of the burden of promoting his own accomplishments, Giuliani is a more effective instructor on the principles of leadership. Still his account of his own many achievements is often skewed by omission and sometimes, exaggeration. He contends, for example, that when he was U.S. attorney, he developed the idea of using the federal racketeering law to convict organized-crime figures as members of a crime family rather than for individual crimes. In fact, that tactic had already been adopted; it was used a year before Giuliani took office to convict members of the Bonanno crime family.

I get the sense that in Leadership Giuliani is still on the campaign trail. Pitching himself to a national audience rather than to his fellow New Yorkers, he comes across as more politically partisan, more ideologically conservative, and more anti-union than I remember in impressions formed in covering hundreds of his news conferences between 1983 and 1997.

Part of the reason for his success, he often said, was that he was pragmatic and not ideological or partisan. His book stresses the importance of ideology. It reminds me of the title of the television show that spoofs New York's City Hall: Spin City.

Paul Moses is an associate professor of journalism at Brooklyn College/CUNY. He covered Rudolph Giuliani as a reporter for Newsday and the Associated Press.