Prayer for the City is a fantastic political biography. Bissinger draws you very close to Ed Rendell during his first administration as Mayor of Philadelphia. The writing is captivating and one can really feel the pull of various political forces in a City experiencing strife. In addition to the Mayor, his Chief of Staff David L. Cohen gets due credit for fantastic work. Bissinger paints all the big challenges that the administration faces with personal color and heart-wrenching tragedy (especially in the area of crime). Crime and poverty are the most common challenges of Rendell's first term and we meet family after family who lose their loved ones too soon due to gun violence. Bissinger's treatment of the DA is dated at best and now doubtlessly out of line with the present need for criminal justice reform. He chalks up prosecutorial 'wins' in ways that feel uncomfortable to read through the lens of the present day. The chapters on public housing feel incredibly contemporary as if the same challenge has persisted unabated (in New York) 30 years later. The most fascinating for me was the veneration of Philadelphia as the 'workshop of the world' particularly as the most prominent ship building center of the 19th C. United States. He bolsters Philadelphia's past to remind us of how its economic collapse was a more precipitous and calamitous fall than we might otherwise imagine. We feel Rendell's and Cohen's limitless energy and passion for pursuing manufacturing jobs knowing, as they do, that it is a Sisyphean task; Philadelphia's future wealth will be in the service sector not industry. An excellent book of its type - far more captivating and inspiring than a self-congratulatory political autobiography.

"The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure among all these strangers. He must not feel automatically menaced by them." -Jane Jacobs

It is a shame that a book like couldn't be written today. No book that revealed this much sympathy towards an Assistant District Attorney who ardently seeks life sentences or a white, libertarian woman who leaves the city after a man robs her at gunpoint, would be given any mainstream time in our new decade. (Our new decade, during which the yearly murder rate has surpassed any given year during the Rendell tenure.)

Before I got through the epilogue, Bissinger had made me tear up, and I realized that this was going to be one of my favorite books.

Bissinger's warts-and-all portrayals of Ed Rendell and David Cohen were a rare insight into what it takes to lead Philly, at its most hopeless, scrappiest, and most loveable. And the portraits of four citizens around the city were the perfect complement to the dilapidated ivory tower of City Hall. If anything, I wanted to hear more about the everyday people: those whose lives could be totally rattled or revived by Rendell's decisions.

Maybe this review is over-inflated because of my intense love of well executed long-form journalism and all things regarding recent Philadelphia history, but man oh man, was this excellent.

if you love philly you must read this book. if you love american cities you must also read this book.

I don't know if a better book has been written about local politics. This book may be one of the best ones I've read about politics, period. It's a dizzying portrayal of a big city mayor trying to navigate the shark-infested waters of public employee unions, the media, state and federal government, job loss, white flight, and more. It's both engrossing and deeply depressing. Not perfect (Bissinger lays it on a bit thick sometimes), but overall I loved it.

this is probably my favorite book i ever had to read for school.

yes, i gave it 4 stars, because it is sometimes bonkers hard to get through, but hard to think of even a runner up for Book That Changed My Thinking The Most And Also Gave Me The Most Opportunities To Insert Pretentious Factoids Into Polite Conversation. which is a major award.

honestly, i don't think there's another book like this anywhere. i was getting a little cynical about politics at the ripe old age of 18 when i read this (little did i know what was to come), and this restored my faith in at least the local level (temporarily) without being cheesy or overly optimistic.

anyway. this book is very underrated.

and it's by the friday night lights guy, if those words mean anything to you.

part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago, and this is the closest i've ever come to an actual review in doing so

A glaring look at Ed Rendell- I appreciated the depth and detail Bissinger wrote. It can be heart breaking to read about all of the violence that Philadelphia experienced in the 90s, not so different from what we are experience today. If you're a political junkie and a fan of city politics, I recommend this book.

3.5.
The book, supposedly on Ed Rendell's first term as mayor of Philadelphia in the 90s, spends a whole lot of time centered on Chief of Staff David Cohen instead. Bissinger has many many lines (if not entire pages) that read as racist, classist, and anti-union. For investigative journalism, it lacked a certain notion of narration. Highlights were the overall analysis on the deterioration of cities (and subsequently, the push towards suburban life) as well as the mini-chapters on the four different Philadelphians.

Really fascinating detail on how the end of a manufacturing economy affected jobs and people in Philadelphia as a shift to a tourism/service one replaced it. This was a story about Philadelphia and the boisterous mayor who managed it during the 1990s but it also portrayed circumstances happening to cities all over the country.

I can't believe that as a lover of Philly and a planner that it took me so long to read this book. It made me reconsider some foundational ideas I held about saving the City of Philadelphia, and truly appreciate how difficult its battles are on every front.

The voices of Philadelphia, its struggles and its heart all come through. It is a MUST read for anyone interested in the fate of our struggling cities, and Philadelphia in particular.

Bissinger's career as a journalist makes him the perfect writer of non-fiction; he does what every journalist should aspire to do--make anything interesting. In his portrayal of Ed Rendell, the mayor of Philadelphia during the 1990s, Bissinger makes the politics, hardships and triumphs of Philadelphia come alive. The story behind the story is even more fascinating, that he was allowed complete access to the mayor and his staff for the five years he compiled information for this book. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights won me over forever--it's a book that I will never, ever forget, and the book that inspired my absolute favorite television show. As FNL was a beautiful portrait of small town America, Bissinger again gives an honest and heart wrenching portrait of urban America, and the demise of its cities.

One of the best, most powerful, and insightful books on American policy and politics I've ever read. I know so much more at its end thanks not only to it's careful array of facts and statistics but also to its intimate pursuit of lives that frame the political scramble in City Hall as well as the personal struggles encountered in four very different corners of the city.