We have two types of Clevelanders, in my experience: those enjoying it here and those who, given a chance, would be gone faster than our sports playoff hopes.

Often the first sort came from another region with low expectations, having heard all the Cleveland jokes, and therefore having been conditioned to think the adjective "Cleveland" devalues all nouns except for "orchestra" and "clinic." They arrive already set in comfy-paying job situations (with a golden parachute if it doesn't work out), and are delighted and amazed to learn the Cuyahoga River stopped burning, cattle don't graze on Lakewood lawns, and there's more to the arts and culture scene than Mail Pouch Tobacco barns. They find downtown good-sized but not too big, and the suburbs not too awash in toxic waste. They like this place.

Locals with the deepest grievances, I find, are the lifers. All their heartbreak, failure and desperation dwell here with them. They never seem to get ahead career-wise (partially because all the good jobs went to the newcomer counterparts above, headhunted from out-of-town by corporate HR). Their savings dwindle away with periodic layoffs, aging parents' health problems, alimony, and the kids born with birth defects from living too near the slag wastes of industry. No, they don't Believe in Cleveland.

As population statistics seem to indicate those in Group Two are getting out when they can, we'll be at parity soon. So two new nonfiction books play to both markets.

Joe Mackall's The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage (University of Nebraska Press, $24.95) comes tagged as a "recovery memoir" at a time when the James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) scandal has thrown that genre of autobiography into disrepute (especially when written by a Clevelander). What, another fame-seeker showing his scars for the big movie deal or Oprah? A shame, really, as there's some vivid introspections of Midwest working-class blues and desolation, all while your inner cynic waits impatiently for a three-act structure to materialize.

Mackall starts with the 1997 death of a cousin, Tom "The Ragman" McGinty, a casualty of drink and drugs at age 38, dying alone in a shabby, near-west-side used-car lot. Mackall, a writer-reporter with years of sobriety behind him, now has a second wife he praises to the heavens and a nice teaching position at Ashland University. McGinty's demise prompts him to return to the Old Neighborhood he'd vowed to leave forever, the blue-collar residences around the Chevy and Ford plants in Brookpark, literally the last streets before Cleveland proper.

Mackall reunites with childhood friends, now grown, and wonders what it is about this environ — the factory-smoke air, the immigrant-Catholic culture, the porn shops and nudie bars right across the street from the cemetery where McGinty and other loved ones repose — that made most of them into depressed alcoholics with divorce- and cancer-riddled families. He rages particularly against organized religion, not merely Catholicism but Buddhism, New Agers and the hated Born-Agains (Islam he skips; party line among college academics must still be that Muslims never hurt anybody). He rips Parma as a stronghold of racism. And he relapses, tempted by easy availability of painkillers online.

No, he does not go to prison or awaken on an airplane with front teeth missing and a hole in his face, nothing so dramatic. Tip a shot of sympathy for Frey and others who resorted to confabulating phony drama and narrative arcs to express "emotional truth." Instead, Mackall's turbulent but evidently well-internalized path back to the light is a very personal and private one. Still, the crucial climactic epiphany of The Last Street Before Cleveland doesn't grab us as much as the earlier, despairing elegy for the Ragman and the persistent malaise of a rust-belt Ohio upbringing.

The book jacket has no photo of the memoirist; I sincerely hope Joe Mackall, eloquent voice of lapsed-Catholic Brookpark guy, isn't actually a Jewish girl from Cleveland Heights who thought her story needed artistic embellishment. These are such duplicitous times.

LES ROBERTS' We'll Always Have Cleveland (Gray & Co.; $24.95) has less lofty ambitions but will better please the Convention & Visitors Bureau. Roberts, author of the popular Cleveland-based Milan Jacovich mystery novels, is an illustrious specimen of the out-of-towner who decides he likes it here — and Roberts not only heard all the Cleveland jokes, he actually knew the Johnny Carson gagwriter (a Clevelander, natch) who invented them, having spent three decades in Hollywood as a writer-producer.

Roberts decamped here in 1986 as a consultant on an Ohio Lottery TV show and got such good vibes from the North Coast that he relocated permanently from LA, a place Roberts scorns as vapidly self-obsessed (and which he duly punishes by telling us as little about his career among the celebrities as he possibly can).

The Chicago-born Roberts instead feels a Midwesterner's affinity for the beleaguered Cleveland, though he does have to do a lot of research into the city's ethnic quilt to come up with his Slovenian P.I. hero. Much of We'll Always Have Cleveland is the Milan Jacovich Companion, as the convivial author explains where this or that plot detail or background character came from. Roberts also gives many, many shoutouts to his Cleveland friends/advisors (chapters that read like an acknowledgments page on steroids). There are also passages on Roberts' favorite thing/where to go/what to do in Cleveland that most of us pretty much know already. Chagrin Falls is cute and quaint and has a popcorn shop, etc.

Besides Roberts' virile, no-nonsense prose, what saves the book from being entirely a puff piece are the sections that deal most candidly with his cancer scare from a few years ago. And he's not entirely a Pollyanna about the town. In a few pages he bemoans the decline of the Flats, the basket-case school system, the lack of new business and, conversely, the pimping out of Gund Arena to become "The Q" to attract what commerce Cleveland can still grab. Overall, though, the book is a love note to the city.

Maybe some clever CWRU engineering students can find a way to touch these books together under the right conditions, that maybe the resulting matter-antimatter explosion will release enough energy to create warp drive. Then those gripers — I admit to being one — can finally beam out for good. And the contented remainders can stay to enjoy their Cape Cod colonials and corporation-paid-for season tickets at the Q, undisturbed by our wailing and gnashing of teeth.

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