If Italy has an armpit, it is surely Naples. Aside from being the subject of one very cheesy love song ("That's Amore"), the city Dean Martin called "Old Napoli" tends to get short shrift not only among Americans, but even within its own country. As a halfItalian, eager to discover my father's family roots, I traveled there one hot summer during college to find, as I made my way down the boot, that the Italians I met were pleased to discover my last name, but fell strangely silent when I proudly answered their automatic question "What part?" with "Naples." Only when I reached Naples, and found it a place of such strong sensory overload that it sounded pungent and smelled loud, were the people I met heartily welcoming and thrilled to learn of my Neapolitan forebears—even once while I was being robbed.

Naples is a place of contradictions, a filthy city that is the repository for much of Italy's most valuable art, a nearly unnavigable maze of streets and smog-laden piazzas crowded with beautiful young things on Vespas, whole families out together, con men, prostitutes, crazy drivers, and la 'ndrangheta—local Mafia. Perhaps it is the location—between mist-capped, smoldering Vesuvius and the glaring Mediterranean—that makes the city so off-limits to outsiders.

Yet, as writer Dan Hofstadter discovered, it is the profusion of contradictions that makes it, arguably, more fascinating than any other Italian city. During his first visit to Naples as a teenage New Yorker looking for meaning, Hofstadter believes he was seduced by the "crowdedness" of this noisiest of cities. Even sleep in Naples, he writes, "is crowded, full of faces, gestures, winks, and warnings."

Fortunately for readers, Hofstadter is no agoraphobic. So caught up in "Naples' warm, maternal, slightly musty embrace" was he as a disaffected teen that he still returns to Naples for assignments and sojourns from his Hudson Valley home. A former contract writer for the New Yorker, Hoftstadter is the author of three other nonfiction books (most notably The Love Affair As a Work of Art) and several translations of French classics.

His new book, Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples is part travelogue, part poem, and part nonfiction love story, chronicling the author's infatuations with Naples and the beautiful but elusive Benedetta, who embodies her city's sense of place as she serves as Hofstadter's guide, muse, and mysteriously unobtainable object of desire. Derisively calling Hofstadter's fascination with Naples a "wet-kiss theory," she is nonetheless capable of being moved to tears over local customs. Once, after calling Hofstadter's friend Gennaro, an uncannily accurate radio psychic, a fake, she purrs his praises for driving Hofstadter home. "But of course he would do that," she says. "He is Neopolitan."

Through Hofstadter, and Benedetta, we see Naples in all its messy historical glory—decaying palaces and churches, streets running together like knots, legendary cliffs—as a backdrop to a captivating cast of characters, dreamers all. These include Donato, the wedding photographer who understands that he must create albums that will become his poor clients' most prized possessions; Gigi, who stutters, chain-smokes, and longs to be an actor; Tina and Marissa, who can cry over the wrong pair of shoes on a bride; Signora Perna, an ever-practical and intellectual true believer in other worlds; and Salvatore, who insists that as a boy he climbed down a shaft near Santa Lucia and saw stars at noon. As Hofstadter's urban journey unfolds, Benedetta grows ever more mercurial.

It is only years later, after a suspicious letter arrives at his home in New York, beckoning him back to Naples, that he is able to solve her mystery. For the light that this final meeting sheds on the nature of amore and Old Napoli, American readers will be grateful.

America: A Prophecy begins with Sparrow telling us how ill-suited he is to his name, which was bestowed upon him 25 years ago by a woman who wore a purple snood and called herself the Princess of Love. He thinks it's too wimpy, and he has a point, but if we think of him as a small voice in the wilderness, something ever-present but not overbearing, fluttering at the edges of our consciousness, it's not a bad fit.

After years of gradually becoming aware of Sparrow's byline on letters to the editor and short pieces in various small magazines and free newspapers—wise commentaries, often funny, sometimes bittersweet—I grew curious about who this person was. Man? Woman? Young? Old? Surely some sort of hippie, with that name, yet too humble and open-minded to be an ideologue. But after finishing this collection, I'm still not certain who he is.
The book ends with approximately 100,000 biographical notes on Sparrow, and that number is only a slight exaggeration, as are some of the entries. I'm pretty sure he's never been a submarine captain, but some things are clear: He's a troublemaker who likes to take long baths, a substitute teacher living on a shoestring budget in the Catskills, a poet in the Greenwich Village scene, a Marxist who has run for President four times, a Conservative Jew and a Buddhist, a 50-something husband and father, and a fan of musicals.

Mostly, he's someone who pays attention. For a guy who hasn't watched television in 28 years, he sure knows a heck of a lot about pop culture.

This collection spans the breadth of Sparrow's writing: from surreal flights of fancy like an account of sex with an ant or an interview with Kurt Cobain after his death, to quiet observations about the sky in the Catskills and his baby daughter, to quotidian dramas like his wife's having a cockroach stuck in her ear. Sparrow is a master at clever subversion (you gotta love a guy who hands out free books in front of The Wiz to discourage people from buying televisions), a student of history, and passionate about language and literature.

My favorite is his "Translations of the New Yorker into English," a piece that brings the reader up short—how can Sparrow nail in just a couple of sentences what took John Updike or Robert Pinsky five stanzas to dance around? Sparrow has no patience for pretension—it's one of his best qualities; he seeks spirituality in a Manhattan Bloomingdale's and beauty in e-mail spam. Yet he's merciless in his disdain for the proliferation of bad poetry.

Currently a columnist for the Phoenicia Times and a frequent contributor to this magazine, Sparrow is finally achieving a bit of fame by writing bumper stickers. Short, pithy insights are his strength, and this collection includes dozens of his proverbs: Cerebral one-liners that sneak up on you, give you a tickle, and leave you pleasantly dazed. If only he wrote fortune cookies.

America: A Prophecy leans toward the silly, and that's plenty entertaining, but what I like best is his own voice of reason, that of another befuddled human being trying to make sense of an absurd and frequently disappointing world. And the book's organization, if there is one, is inscrutable. Pieces are dated, but not always with years, and since they jump around chronologically, keeping track of which President Bush and which wasteful Middle East war Sparrow is deriding requires some effort.

America: A Prophecy, like Sparrow, has no thesis; it's best dipped into at random and savored in small doses—all the better to make it last. To quote one of Sparrow's proverbs: One noodle, long enough, is a meal.

Minus the Hudson River, American history would be a very different affair. Tom Lewis rightly sees the Hudson Valley as a region of American firsts: the first great river that led explorers into the continent's uncharted interior; the first line of defense in the American Revolution; the harbor for the number one city in the world economy; and the first battleground for post-1945 environmentalism.

Lewis's engaging overview of the Valley during the past five centuries, and the region's national prominence during that time, fills an important gap. The last synthesis, Carl Carmer's classic account, was published in 1939.

Like his predecessor, Lewis is a fine wordsmith who targets literate readers in general rather than specialists. Like Carmer, he's obviously done his professional homework, but that's a heavier assignment now. Over 90 percent of the history PhDs ever granted were earned after World War II, creating much higher stacks of paper on the history of the Hudson.

Eight out of The Hudson's nine chapters focus on developments through 1900; the first chapter includes a capsulized natural history of the river and its landscape. Lewis reminds us that the Lower Hudson River is no river at all: It's a fjord, a 150-mile-long deep channel where Atlantic saltwater mixes with fresh mountain water.

Then we learn a goodly amount about the Valley's biophysical milieu via mini-biographies of three 18th- and 19th-century pioneer investigators.

Minibiographies constitute Lewis's principal narrative tool. Where Carmer made history come alive through the lens of folklore, Lewis employs the lives of movers and shakers. As a teacher of literature at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, and maker of prize-winning documentaries, he knows just how to draw audiences into a good yarn.

But yarns about elites come at a price. We don't see "history from below" reconstructing humble as well as mighty lives. Lewis's discussions of slaves in pre-Civil War New York, or rural tenants' revolts, indicate that he's attuned to humble folks, but his spotlight is elsewhere. This approach precludes systematic information on socioeconomic trends, or even chronology. Nevertheless, Lewis' spotlights are revealing.

The Hudson's post-1900 history gets a lively, if overly condensed, final chapter. World War II, rather than Lewis' symbolic choice of the turn of the century, really marks the great divide in the Valley's social fabric. The post-1945 "highway-industrial complex," plus mainframe computers, overturned basic economic patterns that persisted from the mid-1800s through the Great Depression.

When railways displaced canals, they followed parallel routes. Automobiles, by contrast, spread everywhere. Bridge and tunnel building boomed in the 1930s, but people lacked money to buy cars. After 1945, they had cash. And before 1945, lumber, bricks, cement, and marble were transported down the River to build New York City. After 1945, new construction techniques used other materials from other regions. Long-distance trucking of produce along new highways from California dealt a further blow to the Valley's agriculture.

Then, as older industries wound down, the Valley became IBM's valley, and the nation's first civilian high-tech belt. Lateral east-west commuting flows across the Hudson increased relative to traditional north-south flows along relatively isolated sides of the River.

Lewis turned an earlier book, Divided Highways, into a well-received documentary film. He's uniquely qualified to delve deeper into the telling impact of post-1945 roads on the Hudson Valley than he does in his new book. The Hudson could also be the basis for a smashingly good script on the history of America's great fjord, and an occasion to devote more attention to our Valley's great transformation since World War II.