Author clearly thinks Rendell is the best politician ever- it was interesting to get some insight into city politics just before I really became aware of them. Also, never thought a book about Philly politics would bring me to tears in the last chapter.

The characterization of this book as “outdated” is beyond generous.

I was taken aback by the racist, classist, anti-union sympathies that the author revealed at every turn. He essentially glosses over two separate incidents of violence against women at the hands of Mayor Rendell, which in today’s world would be grounds to demand his resignation. He puts an assistant DA—who clearly gets off on condemning young Black men to life sentences—on a pedestal.

And to make matters worse, the writing itself is groan-inducing. Here is one of my favorite examples: “It was pouring outside, and the rain only oppressed the streets even more, robbing them of what little crevices of life and light there might have been…The church inside was cavernous and slightly musty smelling. A chandelier with naked bulbs hung limply from the ceiling, and an American flag stood in the front in a tired salute.”

Why didn’t I just stop reading if I hated it so much, you might wonder. Well, I’m very stubborn and insist on finishing what I’ve started. But please learn from my mistakes—save yourself the time and energy and find a different book to read.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must first say that I am a life-long resident of Philadelphia, and I love this city. I also need to say that when I was finally old enough to vote, Ed Rendell is one of the first candidates I helped to elect. And now, if Ed decided to try another public office, I'd vote for him every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Those opinions were only reinforced by Bissinger. I knew that David Cohen was basically the brains behind the Rendell machine, and I found the representation of their relationship in this book very insightful. Also, Bissinger did his homework. His statistics are compelling and thorough. I was pleasantly surprised by the perspective that both Rendell and Bissinger took of John Street. If you are a native or a transplant, if there is a reason you live in the City of Brotherly Love, check this book out. If you want to get a candid glimpse into the machinations of modern politicians, check this book out.

This was a really excellent book. I had read somewhere, I can't remember where, that it was the best Philadelphia book ever written, and it might be true. You could say it is outdated a bit, but that makes me feel old and I think that is unfair. All this stuff was happening when I was in high school and college, which was not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.
This is not just a Philly book either. It is perfect for understanding what happened to the great American cities in the second half of the 20th century. I am absolutely going to assign a chapter or part of a chapter to my US History students. I feel like I know this stuff pretty well and I still had my eyes opened by this book. The biggest thing is white flight...I had always had a relatively simplistic attitude about what actually happened there. It seems self explanatory, right? Black families moved in, and white families moved to the suburbs because they were racist. And that is not inaccurate, but the part I didn't understand was the way the government engineered it. Bissinger calls it "government-engineered incentive to leave." Essentially, the feds told all the white families, we are investing in the suburbs and we will back your mortgage if you move there. But we will not help you if you try to get a mortgage in the city. The government basically wrote off the working class parts of the cities. So the government basically abandons these neighborhoods, gives white people incentive to leave, traps black families in these emptying, dying places, and then acts surprised about crime rates in the 80s and 90s.
I am extremely impressed by the level of research that went into this. Bissinger basically moved into City Hall for years, and he was there for everything. Literally almost everything. If you read the notes at the end, he was there for the hospital visits, and the phone calls, and the angry meetings, and the parties, and the secret negotiations. He was always there. The only times he wasn't there was when he was visiting his other people he follows in different parts of the city. How did he sleep and see his own family? It's nuts. You get the sense that he really tried hard to be neutral, but it is kind of impossible. He's pretty much always on Rendell's side. I don't see how he could have avoided that though. If you are embedded with a Mayor for years, how are you not going to lean towards the Mayor's point of view?
This is also an amazing book for understanding what it is like to be mayor of a big city. Dealing with the state, dealing with the unions, with Jersey, with Washington, with the City Council, business owners, the sports teams...everything. I don't think I have ever read a book quite like it. I wonder if new mayors read this book before inauguration day. They should.

Gripping as the Friday Night Lights TV show; fascinating look into city politics in the early 90's, with some fascinating analysis (of which I would've appreciated more) about FDR-era federal housing policy's influence on city demographics the next 60 years. Makes me wish B.B. was also around to cover Street + Nutter. He synthesizes four years of a major city's events into a digestible ~350 pages, without feeling at any time like a superficial gloss. Looking forward to reading more Bissinger.

Buzz Bissinger doesn't do things halfway. When he wrote Friday Night Lights, he transplanted his entire family to a small town in Texas for a few years. When he wrote A Prayer for the City, he spent over four years shadowing the mayor of Philadelphia and the mayor's top aides. Bissinger fleshes out Prayer with chapters on other Philadelphians. He includes a displaced dock worker, a prosecutor, a disillusioned member of the Rendell administration, and a woman who had raised her children and her grandchildren and was trying to stay alive long enough to finish raising her great-grandchildren.

I thought the author's treatment of Rendell was admirable but ultimately too sympathetic. The mayor's abusive, erratic, overtly sexual behavior sounded disgusting to me but was consistently downplayed by those around him as stress related, misunderstood, etc. Bissinger also seems dismissive of reporters' efforts, which I find strange because he won a Pulitzer reporting for the Inquirer. I don't think it matters whether the newspaper's staffers were pushing hard for a Pulitzer--the voter fraud they uncovered was appalling and has no place in a democracy.

Here are some of my favorite quotations from the book:

"If I was a woman, I'd be pregnant all the time." --Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, describing his negotiating style

"I am not an atom! I cannot split in two!" --Rendell, during a temper tantrum about being overscheduled

"We are losing our middle class, our working class, to other places. We have to increase our tax base, or we are finished. The city will become Detroit without the automobiles. I will suggest to you gentlemen that with the automobiles, Detroit is not a very pleasant place. Without the automobiles, it would be terrifying." --Rendell

"I'm Jewish, so I don't have the slightest chance of national office." --Rendell, warning of his willingness to make unpopular decisions

"Don't you know Jews don't know how to work instruments like that. . . . It's impossible. It's not in our background." --Rendell, after seeing top aide David Cohen contemplating a walkie-talkie

"I think the last straw for us was scrubbing the coagulated blood of our neighbor off our steps one Sunday morning after she had been shot the night before. . . ." --Libertarian/ex-Rendell aide Linda Morrison, describing why she took a $20,000 loss on her home and fled to the suburbs

"In a way, you appreciate the beauty of life more. . . . In a terrible way, you are part of a select group of people who have a full understanding of man's inhumanity to man and the depth of that cruelty." --Assistant district attorney Mike McGovern

"I shot him. So what?" --Convicted murderer Dwayne Bennett

"If they had a choice between Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad, fifty percent would say, 'Can't we get somebody else?'" --Rendell, describing voters

"I know a region cannot survive without its core city. If the city goes down, the region goes down." --Cohen, explaining how a city's political implosion decreases property values in its suburbs by about 25 percent; he believed that Washington, D.C., would be the first major American city to implode

Give a great nonfiction writer like Buzz Bissinger unfettered access to a colorful and complicated politician like Ed Rendell and you’re going to get an amazing book.

I don’t hand out five stars too often but “A Prayer for the City” probably deserves six.

This inside look at Rendell’s first term as mayor of Philadelphia is much, much more than a biography of a politician, although it’s a darn good biography. More than anything else, “A Prayer” is a heart-wrenching lamentation about our country’s betrayal of its big cities, and about the ramifications of that.

Bissinger doesn’t shy away from addressing federal policy, in all its wonky and nefarious aspects. But what makes “A Prayer for the City” sing, or make that wail, are its vivid descriptions of how policy affects people on a personal level.

Brilliantly, Bissinger devotes much of the book to Philadelphia residents like Fifi Mazzccua, an aging African-American woman who is single-handedly raising a houseful of grandchildren and great-grandchildren while her son rots in prison; or like Mike McGovern, a city prosecutor who confronts the most atrocious acts of violence in the urban cesspool.

“A Prayer” also dives into the travails of political leadership in our society, where even the rare, well-intentioned elected official must constantly deal with people who put their self-interest ahead of the common good.

If you care about cities – or even if you just care about our country – this book is an important one to read.

The American city has been dying for decades. This book - written during the early/mid-90s - chronicles that reality in Philadelphia. It's a fascinating read, especially as we're now going through a similar cycle. Bissinger stitches multiple stories together and offers a multi-faceted look at how federal and local policies and economics affect the people who actually live in and beyond city limits.

Probably my favorite non-fiction book I read in 2022.

If you are from Philadelphia, or from the Delaware Valley, then you will want to read this book because this is your history
The author, Buzz Bissingger is best known for his 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. He is the cousin of Peter Berg, who directed the film adaptation of Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights.
( In a list of the one hundred best books on sports ever, Sports Illustrated ranked Friday Night Lights fourth and the best ever on football. ESPN called Friday Night Lights the best book on sports over the past quarter-century.)
In 1987, while writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bissinger won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for his story on corruption in the Philadelphia court system.
He is a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine.
Since he lived in Philadelphia and wrote about the city so much, he could clearly see how the City was dying. When he heard that the charismatic Edward Rendell was running for mayor, he thought that he had to capture the moment.
He dedicated 4 years in following Rendell and his City Team in their attempts to turn America’s fifth largest city around. This book is very well researched and documented and is primarily based on first hand accounts.
Edward Rendell served as as the 96th mayor of Philadelphia from 1992 to 2000. He would move on to serve as the 45th governor of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2011. He served as chair of the national Democratic Party from 1999 to 2001.
In this book the author also shadows David Cohen.
David L. Cohen is an American businessman, attorney, lobbyist, and diplomat who is now he United States ambassador to Canada. He previously served as the senior advisor to the CEO of Comcast Corporation. Until January 1, 2020, he was senior executive vice president and chief lobbyist for Comcast. He also served as chairman of the board of trustees for the University of Pennsylvania and was chief of staff to former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell.
To flesh out the story and bring it onto the street, he includes the experiences of Linda Morrison, a City Planner and advisor. Jim Mangan, a welder at the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard, Michael McGovern- a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office, and Fifi Mazzccua- a lifelong city resident who was struggling to raise her great-grandchildren after having raising her grandchildren.
The issues facing the city in this book are of interest to all because they are about the same issues facing all of the large cities in America.
The book closes in a final showdown with the threatened closure of the historic 190 year old Philadelphia Navy Yard. (One of the city’s biggest and most important employers).

After the closure, area politicians scrambled to recruit shipbuilding companies to use the Navy Yard’s large dry docks. Mayor Ed Rendell pursued a deal with German shipbuilder Meyer Werft that fell through in 1995 after Governor Tom Ridge rebuffed the proposal’s $167 million in government incentives as “pure fantasy.” Ironically, two years later, Ridge supported a more expensive deal to bring Norway’s Kvaerner (which later merged with Aker, adopting the latter’s name) to Philadelphia. Ridge’s deal created less than half of the deal Rendell was near to closing and costs taxpayers far, far more money.
This had never been clearly reported by the press around the Capitol in Harrisburg

Very enjoyable and informative read. If you love cities, urban policy, and history, this one is for you.

Took this book with me on my honeymoon and read it non-stop in Key West, with many distractions hovering. Being from the Philadelphia area, was an additional draw, but would have enjoyed it, regardless.