A spirited history, street guide and memoir, subtitled "Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels." Kennedy knows and loves the city, where he spent his childhood and youth and once worked as a reporter. Those who have read Ironweed or Billy Phelan's Greatest Game or any of Kennedy's Albany novels will recognize from his fiction the bars, restaurants, mafiosos and, especially, Albany's unsavory 19th-century politicians.  (NYS15, $16.00)