I just hit Jamie McElroy in the ribs.

I am rubbing the ball when my father

arrives at the mound, his frustration

with a son who can’t find home

apparent in his gait and gaze.

I walked three batters before I hit

Jamie McElroy and want to dig a hole

and disappear. What I get is a pep

talk that ends with You made this

mess, now you clean it up.

Thirty-five years later, I am standing

in line at the bank with paycheck in

hand, wondering what Jamie McElroy

is up to. You’re right, Dad. I made

this mess. But you didn’t help any.

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

“Barbarian Days”

William Finnegan

Penguin Press, $27.95

With notable exceptions, most surf writing and storytelling has appealed exclusively to surfers. The sometimes kitschy insider stuff, the you-wish-you-here-but-you’re-not magazine articles, even the iconic “Endless Summer,” most of it is of limited interest beyond the growing tribe. Few have successfully transmitted to a broader audience the sport’s intangible appeal.

Sometimes that’s intentional; understanding the language, and the surf world itself, is a tribal sign of belonging.

That all changed, at least for me, in the mid-’90s when a package arrived from a surfing friend. We’d succumbed together to the sport’s pull, dropped everything, and chased waves for years. “This guy gets it,” said the note with the two New Yorker magazines.

William Finnegan’s two-part New Yorker series, “Playing Doc’s Games,” on the emerging San Francisco surf scene and one of its central figures, an antic hippie oncologist called Mark Renneker, unraveled the inexplicable obsession and the magic of the sport.

There it was, pulled together by a keenly observant reporter: the characters, the unwritten rules, the beauty, the fear, the humiliation, the brazen egos, the pull of it. It was sparing, without sentimentality, told with a crystal clear storyteller’s voice.

Like surfing, with its way of letting you go and pulling you back, Mr. Finnegan the surfer has now returned with a memoir that again breaks new ground for surfing literature. “Barbarian Days,” published this summer, is his account of living with that “wily mistress,” surfing. It is also the story of a coming of age of a man and a sport. Both grew up over the last 50 years, and, in both cases, for good and ill. Mr. Finnegan allowed his other ambition, to be a writer and journalist, to fill up his life, and then fell in love and had a family. He fits surfing into the margins of a busy life now. And surfing itself, well, it has grown up into something commercial and popular, unrecognizable to anyone who taught himself and surfed alone in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

The topic itself would be a local hook enough, seeing that so many people on the South Fork call themselves surfers, and to all of us this should be required reading. But Mr. Finnegan is no stranger to these waters. A sometimes reluctant longboarder at Ditch (it’s in the book), he hunts for waves around here with his friend Peter Spacek, the illustrator, cartoonist, and artist. Mr. Finnegan’s escapades with Mr. Spacek on the island of Madeira are central to the final chapters of his memoir. There, married, pushing middle age, with a noted career in the world beyond, Mr. Finnegan lunges into massive, terrifying surf and asks himself, Why? Why do I do this crazy thing?

And the answer — like the surf sirens who won’t let him go — wells up, almost effortlessly. “A set rolled through, shinning and roaring in the low winter afternoon sun, and my throat clogged with emotion — some nameless mess of joy, fear, love, lust, gratitude.”

As it happened, The New Yorker series in the 1990s was an anomaly for Mr. Finnegan. After dropping out to chase waves in his late 20s, he returned to the United States to become a journalist who focused on Africa, on international conflict, on the illegal drug trade, and on poverty, here and abroad. He’d been hired by The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1987.

But, really, deep down, he was always a surfer. And that psychic wrestling between the passion that consumes him — the search for just one more single, perfect day; some would call it an adolescent, egotistical obsession — and everything else that matters in life is the story of “Barbarian Days.” Wrestling hard with that, it took him seven years to write “Playing Doc’s Games,” delayed by war coverage, reporting from ravaged places, relationships, moves across the country — all those other “more important matters.” And it took some 30 years for him to produce “Barbarian Days.” Thankfully, as Mr. Finnegan himself would say, “surfing, ever wily, twisted free.”

Mr. Finnegan was 26, disenchanted with predictable, materialistic American life, when he and his childhood friend Bryan Di Salvatore took off for the South Pacific with their surfboards, no fixed plans to return, and their notebooks (both were working nonwriting jobs at the time, but they believed themselves to be writers). They had enough money to carry them for months, maybe longer. The trip lasted four years and included the discovery of what is now one of the most famous waves on the planet on the Fijian island of Tavarua.

Viewed from 2015, with surf lessons running at $100 or more an hour at beaches around the world, seemingly everyone calling himself a “surfer” — you’ve heard it: “I learned at a surf camp in Costa Rica” — and surf vacation packages advertised in The New York Times, surfing can now seem almost as conventional as golf.

But in the ’60s and ’70s, when surfing was taking hold of Mr. Finnegan, the sport was nascent, unconventional, gritty, and, most important, countercultural. Mr. Finnegan’s journey was before Google Earth had mapped out almost every coastline. He had no certain destinations, just maps, a sense of the possible, and optimism. His aim was to find perfect waves — and he did — but as it turned out he was searching for something else entirely, something that only came clear at the end of his journey, when he returned to the States.

“Barbarian Days” is a tale of personal self-discovery. Mr. Finnegan admits to his own selfish sexism. His girlfriends join him on his adventure only to discover that he has only one mistress, surfing, and their ambitions and lives are secondary to his. He recognizes his white privilege on his travels through poor South Pacific islands. With barely enough money to get by, he and Mr. Di Salvatore occasionally depend on the generosity of locals who extend food and shelter to these two boys from America, who have the luxury to loaf around finding themselves and playing in the ocean.

It is Mr. Finnegan’s honesty, immense curiosity, and almost anthropological powers of observation about the world, about friendship, and about the difficult choices in life that make his story compelling and his voice so appealing. But it’s his tumultuous relationship to surfing — surfing’s hold on him — that separates this memoir from so many others. When he is caught outside at a break in Madeira, with night falling and the waves going from huge to giant, you are rapt, searching with him for the hope of lights on the seawall that seems so far away, and a way back to life on land, and the safety and predictability of all that.

Biddle Duke, an editor and publisher of weekly newspapers in Vermont, lives part time in Springs.

“Orient”

Christopher Bollen

Harper, $26.99

Geography matters. An author chooses to weave a tale of mayhem, suspense, and fear. What better setting than a remote hamlet, surrounded mostly by water, where there is a lot of open land and where it grows very dark at night? Add to this a tiny, entrenched population disdainful of newcomers and downright suspicious of any stranger, and you can feel the muscles in the back of your neck actively tighten.

So it is fitting that Christopher Bollen, an editor at large for Interview magazine, has chosen to locate his second novel in Orient, the easternmost point on the North Fork of Long Island, and to appropriate the place name as his title. If the locale is minute and ominous, the eponymous novel is big and fully engaging. Mr. Bollen has crafted a first-rate murder mystery set in the present moment.

Not surprisingly, Orient itself — a speck of a place the very mention of which suggests the faraway — is as important a character in this chilling story as any of the humans the author creates. Connected to the rest of the world by the thinnest filament of causeway, Orient’s smallness and remoteness are largely cherished by a few native-born, full-time residents, even as those qualities are under siege by the growing number of successful artists from New York City who seek to build opulent houses there. (“If they hadn’t been priced out of the Hamptons, they would never have made Orient their second home.”)

The tension between newcomers and old-timers — between real estate investors and the local historical board, bent on preserving the Orient they grew up in — is palpable. That tension, of course, is rooted in economic disparity. Describing the proprietor of a local organic farm stand, Mr. Bollen writes, “If darker times had left their scars, his customers’ more recent prosperity cushioned them.”

Into this less-than-bucolic scene enters Mills Chevern, a young drifter in his late teens. Mills comes to Orient at the behest of Paul Benchley, a New York architect whose roots are in Orient and who first encountered him in Manhattan. Following the recent death of his mother, Paul seeks Mills’s help in clearing multiple generations’ worth of accumulated things from the many rooms of the large Benchley home. It’s a mighty task to which the youngster proves equal.

Paul also wishes to provide Mills a kind of haven. Knowing that Mills grew up in an unstable series of foster homes resonates with Paul, whose family had sought to adopt a sickly foster child years ago, before that child died.

In time-honored mystery fashion, a couple of murders occur early on — first of a local caretaker/handyman, then of an elderly doyenne of the year-round community. Naturally, huge suspicion falls on Mills, the outsider about whom people know practically nothing. When a fire started by arson takes the lives of almost the entire family living next door to the Benchley house, the youngster is scrutinized even more closely and alienated even more from most of the people in Orient.

As though this crime streak isn’t enough, a number of grotesque mutant animal corpses show up, playing to people’s deep and dark concerns about what really goes on in the government laboratory on nearby Plum Island. Fear abounds.

Against this backdrop, Mills knows that leaving Orient will only make him appear guiltier, and that the only way to establish his innocence is to identify the killer or killers before the police do. With few resources and hardly anyone on his side, that is what he sets out to do — against all odds and with time running out.

Though we know precious little about Mills, one thing we do learn about him is that he is gay. Interestingly, not much is made of that, beyond its reinforcing his dramatic function as an outsider. (“The loneliness that engulfed him on his way to take out the trash was the loneliness of a clear-cut world.”) Most of the other characters are not even aware of the teen’s sexuality, nor does it contribute in a significant way to the overall narrative. Perhaps that signals, in this post-Obergefell-v.-Hodges era, that we are seeing the normalization of gay characters in fiction.

At slightly more than 600 pages, the length and heft of this novel should not deter any reader who appreciates an engaging mystery rich in local color. Mr. Bollen tells a fine story. Tension and interest never flag, and the final 50 pages or so make for a true page-turner. Of the final resolution to the story I can honestly say, “I did not see that coming!”

Orient has been compared elsewhere to an Agatha Christie mystery. To this author’s credit, however, he does not resort to the occasional Christie device of introducing a new character at the last minute in order to solve the crimes at hand.

In the end, of course, guilt is revealed, but one also comes away with an overarching sense of an unhappy place at the end of the world. And the ethos of that place contributes to the drama that unfolds there. “You know, I blamed you at first,” says one character to another. “But then I decided: it’s Orient’s fault. All this phony peace and quiet, like it can never quite wake itself up.”

My only regret was that I was not on Long Island when I read “Orient.” Proximity would only have imbued the experience with an even more chilling edge.

A weekend resident of East Hampton, James I. Lader periodically contributes book reviews to The Star.

Surfing journalism and literature are pretty thin. But there are notable exceptions:

A Patagonia-financed film, “The Fisherman’s Son,” is a powerful story of how surfing empowered a Chilean environmental crusader.

Montauk’s Allan Weisbecker’s surf pilgrimage, “In Search of Captain Zero,” tells the story of his own harrowing, crazy, hilarious journey.

In his memoir “Crazy for the Storm,” Norman Ollestad writes about his relationship with his father, which revolved around surfing and skiing, and how that gave him the strength and confidence to save himself from sure death after, as a child, he was the lone survivor of a plane crash on a frozen mountaintop.

Matt Warshaw’s “The History of Surfing” is a book about the sport that every surfer should own. Stunning photography, meticulous reporting, and crisp writing.

black leather boots

tight tan jodhpurs

riding crops aloft

pendulum ponytails

no horse named Nabokov

languages spoken:

Spanish, Japanese,

Irish and money

Hermes saddles on sale

from $1,995 to 4,995

softer pretzels found

on the shtreets of Philufya

Springsteen daughter rides

Who's the Boss?

Bloomberg daughter rides

The Old Grey Mare

program says equine athletes

can jump over anything

save Water Mill traffic

security rivals Secret Service

best keep thoughts to self:

high leather boots

tight white breeches

hit me with your best crop

--

      Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

I am most at home

with horseshoe crabs

and twirling flatworms,

evolutionary travelers,

my extended family,

but we lack parity.

Some worms have five hearts,

kept occupied;

I have only one, always at risk.

I am not segmented

but I have a coelom,

a body cavity,

and my brain is sticky

as a spoon worm.

I am eukaryotic

by definition;

all my cells have nuclei,

and I have more psychic weight

than blue-green algae.

I am not a stinker sponge.

I am pentamerous

and can grasp a slippery issue.

I like smart snails

and the molluscan point of view.

I have the sensitivity

of a tunicate

and squirt philosophy

like a piss clam.

Michael Walsh, a member of the East End Poetry Workshop for many years and the author, with Virginia Walker, of the recently published collection “Neuron Mirror,” died in May. A reading and memorial for him will be held on Sept. 13 at 2 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

I lived a boy in a white house,

Time beneath the titan elms unknown,

A house apart in a green yard:

I lived as though a boy alone.

Linoleum in blue-white swirls

Held secrets on the bathroom floor:

The Joker’s gaunt, malicious face,

A snake that eased beneath the door.

The barn’s loft with its lidless stare,

An elbow of the apple tree,

Peered in my window all night long

And by moonlight went watching me.

Crouched in the shadowed middle hall,

Behind the old clothes rack, each night

A patient, wanting ghost dared me

To sprint again toward friendly light.

When I unlatched the sticky door

That sealed the huddled attic stair

I knew somehow why that old gun —

That stolid, bygone gun — leaned there.

No one can know the house I knew,

My house alone until the day

I left, and never could go back.

What child can ever choose to stay?

Walter Donway lives in East Hampton. “My House” is included in the “Long Island Sounds” poetry anthology for 2015, published by the North Sea Poetry Scene. Its release will be celebrated with a reading on Sept. 23 at 6:30 p.m. at Briarcliffe College’s Patchogue campus.

“Why Not Say

What Happened”

Morris Dickstein

Liveright Publishing, $27.95

In this beautifully wrought, rather romantic memoir, the renowned literary critic Morris Dickstein recounts the tale of a quintessential American journey. It is a story that begins in a loving, happy, but strictly monitored Orthodox Jewish household on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mr. Dickstein, born in 1940, attended a Yeshiva school, where he studied religious texts in the mornings (in Yiddish) and received a secular education (in English) in the afternoons.

On the surface, recounts the author, he could not have been a happier child. “I had the swagger of the precocious kid, always merry and bright, who spoke early and did clever things. Yet I felt somehow on trial, rarely free of my parents’ watchful eyes.” His mother’s anxious, exaggerated worries about his health were to become a leitmotif throughout much of his adult life.

Mr. Dickstein, now distinguished professor emeritus of English and theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, eventually left the warm embrace of Orthodox Jewish life, but as this memoir makes clear it was not without ambivalence and conflict. Even while attending Columbia University he was enrolled as a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary; it was as if he were preparing for two different lives. At last, having become wholly enchanted by his literary studies — especially English and American literature — he dropped out of the seminary just shy of graduation.

Thus began Mr. Dickstein’s remarkable 40-plus years as an essayist, author, professor, public intellectual, and cultural historian.

There is a generous, modest, self-effacing spirit that pervades these pages, as well as a good deal of wit and the occasional gossipy tidbit (e.g., Susan Sontag’s self-serving revision of her past). Sexually naive when he arrived in New Haven as a graduate student, he falls deeply in love with the slim and elegant L. But he cannot imagine himself in the guise of a swashbuckling lover. As he remarks, he did not personally believe himself the answer to Freud’s famous question: “What does a woman want?” However, the love affair does proceed apace, and there is a very funny riff when young Morris is anticipating a tryst with L. in a friend’s empty apartment. As he looks forward to this magical evening, the author finds himself in a state of constant arousal, and he worries about the fact that a male in a state of tumescence for more than four hours may constitute a medical emergency!

Mr. Dickstein is fortunate to have entered his chosen field in the heyday of some of the great literature teachers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as Lionel Trilling and Jacob Taubes (at Columbia), F.R. Leavis (at Cambridge University), and Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Rene Wellek (at Yale). As the critic Molly Haskell has written, this account of a passionate young scholar’s passage through the sober ’50s and the tumultuous ’60s is “an intellectual joy ride.”

As a small example, here is the memoirist recalling what it felt like to teach a particular poem when he himself was in his late 20s: “[R]eading literature simply for pleasure and expounding it for students are radically different experiences. Having spent years with these poets, still I wondered whether I could fully express what gave them such significance for me. Wordsworth’s Immortality ode, evoking his wild Edeni childhood and receding past, poignant in his fear of declining powers, had always moved me deeply, often to tears. I had read it aloud to L. when I was courting her, as it offered coded insight into who I really was, my emotional landscape.”

Candid and beautifully written, “Why Not Say What Happened” invites the reader into that landscape, and it is an invitation well worth accepting.

Maggie Scarf’s books include “Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women.” A fellow at Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College, she lives in Sag Harbor.

Morris Dickstein lives part time in Sag Harbor.

“The Prize”

Jill Bialosky

Counterpoint, $25

Many notable books have been written about the dramatic intersection of art and life, exploring how each informs the other and speculating on their relative value. They’re often fictional takes on actual artists, from the old masters to more modern figures. In “The Prize,” Jill Bialosky’s absorbing new novel, the focus is on an invented protagonist, Edward Darby, a dealer in contemporary art, a middleman devoted to the work he represents. Although the New York City gallery he runs, but doesn’t own, must turn a profit to survive, Edward’s commitment is more idealistic than materialistic. As he sees it, “Art, in essence, was priceless.”

His boss, May, an elderly woman with a “face powerful as a building,” displays genuine esteem and affection for him, but her concerns are practical. “If you love art then you’d better get out of the business,” she tells him, playfully and seriously at once. Still, inspired by his late father, Harold, a scholar of Romantic poetry, Edward believes in the holiness of art, that it offers “a refuge from the trouble in the world.” For the sake of the work itself, he patiently courts his artists and nurtures them — as confidant, critic, therapist, and agent.

  Edward’s career and his sense of serving the larger cultural good come to depend largely on the well-being and success of a particularly gifted and neurotically needy young painter named Agnes Murray, whom Edward positions, to her delight, “as a new Old Master.” Agnes is married to Nate Fisher, another artist — once her mentor but now her fiercest competitor, and possibly even her saboteur. Both of them use images of 9/11, the most significant event of their time, in their paintings.

Edward counsels and comforts Agnes about her art and her life, even keeping her company on one occasion until she falls asleep, like a protective parent with an anxious child. She frequently expresses her reliance on his judgment, and her enormous gratitude. Thrilled by their close collaboration in mounting a show, she gushes, “You have the ability to bring to life what’s in my head.”

But when he offers some fairly gentle but honest criticism of her newest paintings for an exhibit that could make or break May’s gallery and her own reputation, she responds petulantly, while unpinning and shaking out “her hysteria of hair.” Agnes feels threatened rather than grateful for Edward’s guidance this time around, and she threatens defection in return.

Edward’s personal life is in dire jeopardy, too, as he and his wife, Holly, a volunteer at an animal refuge, drift away from each other, emotionally and physically, and he becomes more and more obsessed with Julia Rosenthal, a married sculptor. As with his passion for art, he seems at first to take the high road. When he and Julia are sitting in a bar, he thinks, innocently enough, “It was a luxury to be quiet with another person,” even though he’d ruminated earlier about her neck and eyes and skin, concluding that “It was a vacation just to look at her.” But as they keep meeting, accidentally, in the beginning, and then deliberately, at art conferences abroad, his sexual desire is more blatantly realized and expressed

Returning home to his wife and beloved teenage daughter from a trip to Berlin, where he and Julia have teetered on the edge of an affair, Edward doesn’t feel the usual anticipatory joy of reunion but won’t really take responsibility for his change of heart and mood. The house is dark. Holly isn’t there to greet him with a welcoming kiss and a hot meal. And while admitting to himself he’d momentarily forgotten that her father is gravely ill, he vaguely places blame elsewhere, even finding that “The key no longer turned with ease, he had to jiggle it. . . .”

There are two parallel lines of suspense in “The Prize” — whether Edward will succumb to his attraction to Julia and further endanger his marriage, and whether the volatile and narcissistic Agnes will enhance or ruin him professionally.

As the novel progresses, more and more of Edward’s inner life and its conflicts are gradually revealed. We learn of a brief earlier marriage to a fellow college student named Tess, and of her tragic death during an estrangement — essential biographical facts he’s somehow never shared with Holly. When he tells Julia about Tess, this seems like an even larger betrayal of Holly than his extramarital longings.

We also learn that Edward impetuously purchases very expensive accessories — gloves and scarves he can’t afford and that he hoards but never wears. He defends this odd practice by viewing those articles as objects of beauty, like the art he worships, and rationalizing that using them would make them “ordinary, like everything else.” And perhaps he ascribes to the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s idea that “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects.”

Edward also wonders if betrayal is another form of intimacy. But as he finds it harder to justify some of his other thoughts and actions, he seeks guidance (and perhaps absolution) from a psychotherapist. Yet even in the safe professional setting of her office, he withholds certain information about himself that would expose him to uncomfortable scrutiny. And he continues to act in ways that echo the self-destructive tendencies of his revered father. Although we are always in Edward’s point of view in the novel, we can discern and understand (much sooner than he does) Holly’s disappointment and rage when some of his secrets are finally confessed. The reader is compelled to question whether this tattered marriage can possibly be saved.

Edward has suffered two great losses, of Tess in an accident and of his promising young father to an overdose of lithium. Sometimes he appears to navigate his days in a kind of fugue state in which the past that so influences the present for him is of more consequence than his tenuous future. He keeps shouldering the burden of guilty grief over Tess, while his father’s brilliance, along with the consequences of his mental illness, resonates in Edward’s mind. “He didn’t know what was worse, to be ordinary like his mother, or to strive for the perfection that had taken his father away from her.”

Like Edward, his father, too, was a man of secrets that his son feels compelled to uncover, a painful process that brings some comfort and a resolution to the mystery of Harold’s unfulfilled promise.

The eponymous “Prize” doesn’t come into play until nearly the end of the novel, when Agnes Murray, whose loyalty to Edward and the gallery is still in flux, is in the running for an award that can cement the critical and commercial success of the winning artist. Agnes’s hot and cold relationship to Nate, as well as her own (and Edward’s) professional fate, is also a factor in the contest. Adding to the tension, another gallerist, far less principled than Edward — “He’d befriend a serial killer if he thought it would get him somewhere” — vies with him for both Agnes’s and May’s favor. And all the while, Edward fears that “he’d not only lost his edge, but perhaps worse, the ability to be truly moved.”

I love reading novels that enlighten me about a given subject without seeming didactic — glove-making in Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” boating and fishing in John Casey’s “Spartina.” “The Prize” depicts the machinations of the art world — from aspects of craft to those of commerce — in fascinating detail. As the adage says, life is short and art is long, but not all of the latter has permanence, as Edward discovers in his constant search for the newest definitive work.

Jill Bialosky wears several literary hats; she is a respected and admired editor, poet, and memoirist, as well as a novelist, and the many strengths of “The Prize” reflect that varied experience. It’s a shapely, well-researched book, written with a poet’s clarity of language and a memoirist’s psychological insight. Best of all, it is a work of novelistic imagination with a fine sense of felt life.

Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include “An Available Man,” “The Doctor’s Daughter,” and “Hearts.” She lived part time in Springs for many years.

Jill Bialosky lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton. She will read from “The Prize” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Sept. 19 at 5 p.m.

“Just Kids

From the Bronx”

Arlene Alda

Henry Holt and Company, $28

The assignment to review Arlene Alda’s “Just Kids From the Bronx: Telling It The Way It Was” left me a bit cranky. “Isn’t she a children’s book author?” I thought. After a quick look at her Wikipedia page, I was reminded that Ms. Alda is the author of 15 children’s books, many of them prize winners and one a best seller.

Ms. Alda’s website cites a chorus of accolades for her latest work from political elites and celebrities, including former President Bill Clinton, who says that “Just Kids From the Bronx” is “an inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled.” Barbara Walters claims these “fascinating recollections . . . run the gamut from surprisingly funny to painfully shocking.”

I was certain the publicity machine was overpromising and that the pages were bound to underdeliver. Before I even cracked the cover, I wanted to disparage this book.

So, I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud before I even finished the foreword. Ms. Alda offers the reaction of one contributor: “I’m glad you’re doing a book about the Bronx. I’m sick and tired of hearing about Brooklyn.” As a New Yorker, I couldn’t help but chuckle. I’ve also had enough with the Brooklyn fever, the farm-to-table foodies and bearded hipsters. I decided to give these oral histories about this unsung borough a chance.

“Just Kids From the Bronx” is 60 conversational interviews deftly edited by Ms. Alda. In fact, much of their beauty and power lies in their brevity. The lineup of Bronxites is carefully curated — individuals who’ve excelled across a broad swath of disciplines, ranging from educators to business people, from athletes to artists and many others. The reader is taken on a chronological journey of compelling memoirs.

Each entry is a snapshot — a slightly faded photograph — a mere glimpse into the life of the storyteller. The chronology of interviewees — the first born in 1922 and the last in 1991 — provides a historical and cultural backdrop as the reader witnesses nearly a century in the evolution of a borough. The Jews, Italians, and Irish give way to African-Americans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans.

“Just Kids From the Bronx” opens with an anomaly — the only excerpt not from an interview, a posthumous contribution from an unpublished memoir by Abe Rosenthal, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and longtime executive editor of The New York Times. Mr. Rosenthal’s mother would regularly shout, “ ‘Fresh Air!’ . . . And then from her lips came the command that rang through every apartment in the Bronx neighborhood every day: ‘Go grab some fresh air!’ . . . As other American pioneers and gamblers kept moving west, the Jews of New York kept moving north toward fresh air.”

With this first excerpt, Ms. Alda opens a window into the Bronx — the aspirations of the mostly immigrant residents and the sense that something magical and life-enhancing was in that air.

My favorite interviews have the best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark talking tenderly about the loss of her father when she was just a girl; the prize-winning scientist and M.I.T. professor Mildred Dresselhaus offering anecdotes that reveal the source of her ferocious work ethic; Regis Philbin, the entertainer, admitting that, as a boy, he wanted to be Bing Crosby; former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a four-star general, remembering being the Shabbos goy earning a quarter by turning lights on and off for Jews on the Sabbath, and Joyce Hansen, a children’s book author, recalling how all the action in her world “took place on the stoop. It was our town square.”

The book’s real star is, of course, the Bronx itself, vast and physically beautiful. The reader travels its major thoroughfares and back alleyways. We see then-President Franklin Roosevelt riding down the Grand Concourse in his open car, waving to a crowd. We can practically hear the crack of the stick hitting the ball in the endless games of stickball.

Education and family are themes that run through nearly every story. The Bronx High School of Science is referred to time and again as a transformative institution. Teachers cared and scholarships changed lives. Arthur Klein, pediatric cardiologist and president of the Mount Sinai Health Network, expressed the pride evident in so many Bronx Science students: “When I graduated from Bronx High School of Science, there were twenty-one of us in my graduating class who got into M.I.T. We were the largest single contingent from any high school in the United States going to one of the foremost universities in the country.”

Family mattered most of all. Jemina Bernard, an educator, made the point that she didn’t know the terms “extended” and “immediate” family but benefited from “love and nonstop constant support of my whole family.” Robert Levine, an entertainment lawyer and literary agent, said, “As a kid, I was fat and my mother supported me unconditionally. When she took me to the family doctor who told her, ‘You know your son is too fat and you should do something about that,’ her response was, ‘My son is too fat? Look at your wife.’ ”

Al Pacino relished the stories told by his adored grandfather as they sat on their building’s roof: “And you know — it was beautiful. I mean the world up on the roof. I wish I could describe it to you artfully. It was as close to poetry as I could get.”

Not all tales are sweet, and “Just Kids From the Bronx” avoids saccharine sentimentality. References to the tough and difficult conditions permeate. One woman, identified only as anonymous and a self-described “shy girl and pretty much of a loner,” reveals the pain of her childhood as a victim of incest.

I wondered whether “Just Kids From the Bronx” might not travel well. The same way I imagine people in Ohio don’t really understand a Woody Allen movie. Are there just too many inside jokes and proprietary nuances?

Upon reflection, I believe these oral histories are universal. Together, they form a study of the power place holds in one’s psyche. Between interviews, I found myself pausing to muse on my own Midwestern upbringing. And I asked close friends whom I’ve known only as adults about where they grew up. Ms. Alda’s premise holds true: Our original neighborhoods root and steer us through our lives.

In her own essay, Ms. Alda writes, “We lived in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. Mother, father, older sister, older brother, the mutt fox terrier Spotty, and me. We ate our meals, played cards and board games, did homework, and told jokes in a small area adjacent to the kitchen called the dinette.” And of her parents, she remembers her “father’s belly laugh” that “drowned out the punch line” of his favorite joke, and a mother so patient that she could easily wait for “chicken to roast or a cake to rise or clothes to dry on the indoor bathroom clothesline.” Like many other kids from the Bronx, Ms. Alda’s mother was motivated by the immigrant’s dream: “This is America. Your life can be better than mine.”

“Just Kids From the Bronx” is proof that the immigrant dream endures, and the kids make it come true.

Sally Susman, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives in Manhattan and Sag Harbor.

Arlene Alda has a house in Water Mill. She will speak about her book tomorrow for the Fridays at Five series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.