“Just Kids From the Bronx,” a collection of 62 oral histories edited by the photographer and author Arlene Alda into compact memoir sketches, also juxtaposes past and present. Reading the early entries, which feature big Jewish and Italian families in small apartments and anecdotes like buying a malted after being tipped for answering the hallway telephone, I couldn’t help thinking of stories I’ve read of kids growing up in, well, Brooklyn. There are exceptions: A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal, who once edited this newspaper, describes how his parents moved north to the Bronx for fresh air. I doubt anyone moved to Brooklyn in the last century for the fresh air.

Because nearly everyone in this book went on to great success, the stories can start to sound the same. Carl Reiner, Jules Feiffer, Colin Powell, Al Pacino and most of the rest made it, either with the help of loving but tough parents or tough but ­loving teachers. One wishes a few more losers could have told their stories, too.

But the similar arcs don’t get in the way of some great moments. Reiner recalls his first performance, standing on one leg in class while putting the other behind his head, and his first theatrical tour — his teacher taking him to other classrooms so everyone could see him do it; David Yarnell, a television producer, describes the summer he and a cousin made $270 growing marijuana; and Steve Janowitz, a comedy writer, in the collection’s slam-dunk funniest story, remembers the failed attempts by him and his goofy friends to form a gang — until a real gang challenged them. “Gang? What’s that?” they miserably asked their tormentors. “We’re — no, no — we’re a club. A club!”

The warm glow of goofy, non-gang nostalgia is broken by Anonymous, a woman who recounts episodes of incest with her father. It’s as harrowing as Janowitz’s is funny.

“Just Kids From the Bronx” gets better in later sections, where the borough falls apart and many of those close-knit ­families slide into alcoholic or drug-fueled dysfunction. Hip-hop elbows out Bing Crosby, and fond reminiscences are replaced by something that feels less wistful and much more real.

Luis Ubiñas, who ran the Ford Foundation, describes heroin dealers building their customer base by creating young addicts. Sotero Ortiz, Wilfredo Feliciano and Hector Nazario, graffiti artists known as Tats Cru, give a primer on their strategies and techniques with enough boyish enthusiasm to cause someone who grew up in 1970s New York and hated graffiti to think about it differently. They painted subway cars in northern Bronx yards knowing the trains would soon roll south through the city and back again, showing off their handiwork.

But my favorite story comes from Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan.

When he was 12, he went to the roof of his building with a telescope. Someone saw a black kid up there with a long tube and called the cops. Young Neil, thinking fast, let them look through the viewfinder, and there they saw the craters of the moon. They were entranced by the sight of this magical place so distant from the Bronx, and Brooklyn, and all the bitter streets of the city.