Nathan Gelgud illustration inspired by Arlene Alda's 'Just Kids from the Bronx,' 2015.

The three-page table of contents for Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx promises a parade of varied voices offering childhood stories of growing up in New York's northernmost borough. Comedian Carl Reiner, television personality Regis Philbin, illustrator Maira Kalman, actor Al Pacino, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, hip-hop pioneer Melle Mel, and slugger Bobby Bonilla all make appearances in the pages of this oral history.

But Just Kids features more than the stories of the famous. Arthur Klein, president of the Mount Sinai Health Network, says that the Cold War led him to become a cardiologist instead of following his true passion by becoming a teacher. Restaurateur Jaime Rodriguez, Jr. says that he and his father were so good at selling fish on the street near the Bronx River Parkway that they created traffic problems, and when authorities made them move to the Cross Bronx Expressway, the same thing happened. Mark Cash, a lawyer specializing in tax law, tells a story about the time he and a group of neighborhood kids tried to sail a mattress down the Bronx River.

These are stories about growing up in a hardscrabble environment, about defining moments and the small interactions that create our futures. Milton Glaser, the hugely influential and successful graphic designer, talks about the time his cousin came over with a paper bag and asked if Milton wanted to see a bird. When the cousin drew a bird on the bag (instead of pulling a live one out of it, as expected), it changed Glaser's life forever. "It was as if he had created life in front of me...I suddenly realized that I was going to spend my life creating life."

The stories are arranged chronologically, and as they progress, one gets a sense of the borough changing, as quaint stories about common phones transition into experiences with drug-dealing and gunfire. But what emerges from Just Kids from the Bronx is a picture of a borough that has inspired countless numbers of its children to great things, a tough region of New York City full of underdogs who continue to fight the odds.

Nathan Gelgud comic inspired by Milton Glaser's story in Arlene Alda's 'Just Kids from the Bronx,' 2015.