The strange, faded glamour of a neighborhood in decay often reaches its peak in the bars that define the territory. It can be a place where everybody knows your name or a spot where people know enough to deny ever having met you. Sunny's Bar was a little of both and a lot more besides. Open just one night a week in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood before gentrification buffed its rough edges away, the was an unusual place that Tim Sultan stumbled into at random one night and in some ways never left. Sunny's Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World is a love letter to the place and time, but mostly to Sunny Balzano himself, the owner and a great American character.

Sultan describes Sunny as a barman philosopher and artist; he originally escaped from Red Hook and the family business to travel, spending time in India, rubbing shoulders with Andy Warhol's Factory denizens and finding a patroness of his own art before returning to take over the bar. Once a haven for longshoremen, it was also a safe place for mobsters to drop in and discuss private matters in the back room that doubled as an art studio. No kind of businessman, Sunny would make ice one tray at a time in the fridge and save it up for the Friday nights when he was open. Drinks were sold on a donation basis until inspectors intervened, taking much of the charm with them.

As Sunny's grew in popularity—the regulars were stymied when a "party bus" full of 20-somethings descended on the place one night—Sultan moved on to a new watering hole.

We can never really get back to the places that define an era in our lives. If they're not done in by an act of God, we grow so much in the intervening years that on returning they look like keychain ornaments. Sunny's Nights is a snapshot of a place and time that are no more, but also a loving portrait of the man who defined them.

When it comes to inspirational books, it’s hard to beat Alive, Piers Paul Read’s 1974 account of the survival and eventual rescue of 16 survivors of a plane crash in the Andes. Roberto Canessa, one of two men who hiked out of the mountains and then led authorities to the survivors’ location, wisely doesn’t try to beat it in I Had to Survive, choosing instead to write (with Pablo Vierci) a complementary account of the ordeal and its effect on the subsequent four decades of his life.

It’s been quite a life, with Canessa forging a career as a pediatric cardiologist in his native Uruguay. The book is his way of expressing how, as Vierci puts it, “his ordeal on the mountain had shaped his life.”

For the record, Canessa wastes no time addressing what, for many, was the most salient feature of Alive: how the survivors had to consume “the only nourishment that was keeping us alive, the lifeless bodies of our friends.” But he has a larger purpose than explaining that decision. Rather than consigning his ordeal to the past, he’s made it an indelible part of his life.

So while the first part of the book recounts the crash and its aftermath, the second part is where Canessa truly bares his soul. From his words and those of his family and the families of his patients, it’s clear that while some people might think the Andes cast a shadow over his life, his view is totally different: “It’s the light from the mountain that continues to illuminate my path, in life and in death.”

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.