Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who grew up to become director of the Hayden Planetarium, remembers the police being called when he was 12 after anxious neighbors spotted him on the roof of his apartment house with a telescope. (“This is the ’70s,” he says, “and it’s Riverdale, and my skin color is substantially darker than that of anybody else in the community, and so suspicions were high.”)

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And Chazz Palminteri, who witnessed a murder from his stoop when he was 10, invoked his father’s favorite saying, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent,” when he was fired as a doorman and, unable to find work as an actor, wrote what turned out to be the movie “A Bronx Tale.”

Some of Ms. Alda’s subjects had mentors. Some surmounted low expectations. What transformed all these denizens of the Bronx into boldfaced names, and by such serendipitous routes? Just look at the angelic faces captured in the photographs that accompany each of the essays and ponder the question she poses: “How did they find a place for themselves?”

It’s finally spring, a season whose arrival as recently as a generation ago would have spurred wistful, winter-weary New Yorkers to begin scoping out summer escapes in the Catskills. For many, the first stop was predictable. Elaine Freed Lindenblatt revives those memories (including a rice pudding recipe) in “Stop at the Red Apple Rest: The Restaurant on Route 17” (Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press).

Ms. Lindenblatt recounts how after his garment business failed, her father, Reuben Freed, moved the family from Brooklyn to the site of an unfinished roadside diner 50 miles upstate in Tuxedo, hired Hymie (Red) Appel, whose family owned a hotel in Loch Sheldrake, as his manager and, with partners, opened in time for Memorial Day 1931. For half a century, Mr. Freed would welcome motorists shuttling between the city and the mountains.