What is history but the story of how we came to be? All our past—every tiniest tick of it—led to today, and every passing second casts us into tomorrow. We do things for reasons whose origins we barely remember, and the things we do set the pattern of the future, with our own choices no more assuredly understood than those of our ancestors. Ronald Reagan quipped that “status quo” was Latin for “the mess we’re in.” It might also mean “the mess we’ve been handed,” for all history is simply a mess handed forward, from which we are expected to sift out treasure, if we can but find it.

Thomas Cahill made a life of publishing others’ thoughts on history and religion before deciding to put forth his own examination of “the mess we’ve been handed.” His Hinges of History series, beginning with How the Irish Saved Civilization, offers his interpretation of pivotal moments, cultures and individuals who have contributed both treasure and trash to the mess we’re in. Heretics and Heroes, his latest addition, turns his glass upon the Renaissance, the era of grandiose art and even greater upheaval, as the culture of medieval Europe slammed headfirst into an onslaught of new ideas and new discoveries. Columbus found an astounding New World, the Italian artists pursued incomparable forms of expression and a priest in Wittenberg challenged the understanding of faith—and between them all, they brought forth political and religious changes that overturned the world.

Cahill’s book is not strictly a history, but rather a selection of gleanings from it—an interpretation of history, rather than history itself. As an interpretation, it very much arises from Cahill’s own world view, rather than an objective assessment. The book is not about what happened, but rather what happened as Cahill sees it—history salted heavily with opinion, ranging from art criticism to religious interpretation to political commentary. Yet even where the reader may disagree, Cahill’s insights remain thought-provoking, and his examination of the characters who altered their age and our own, for good or ill, is often quite fascinating. Though flawed as history, Heretics and Heroes still offers an interesting window into a time when muddle piled onto muddle, and does indeed manage to brush away that debris for bits of gold.

Howard Shirley is a writer living in Franklin, Tennessee.

Not many people would leap at the chance to travel with a group of paper historians to the far reaches of southwestern China to witness traditional papermaking done essentially as it has been done since its invention nearly 2,000 years ago.

But Nicholas A. Basbanes, “a self-confessed bibliophiliac” (the term roughly translates as someone who loves, loves, really loves books), has made a later-life career of exploring the worlds of fellow book-obsessed souls and in the process has mapped a fascinating, little-discussed corner of cultural history. His first book, published when he was 50, was the surprise bestseller A Gentle Madness (1995), an illuminating, often amusing look at book collectors. His previous book, About the Author (2010), explored the creative process of writers. Now he turns his attention to the medium that enables his bibliophilia to flourish: paper. Thus a trip to China, where papermaking originated, is a no-brainer for Basbanes.

In fact, On Paper is constructed around a series of road trips, visits and face-to-face interviews. There is the trip to China to begin with, another to Japan, and a visit with Jonathan Bloom, a scholar of Islamic art at Boston University, as Basbanes traces the dissemination of the art and science of papermaking from China and Japan, along the Silk Road to the Arabian Peninsula and Europe, and on to the Americas. Later in the book, Basbanes visits the Crane & Co. mill in Dalton, Massachusetts, where the increasingly security-conscious manufacture of U.S. currency paper has been going on since the family-owned business first won the government contract in 1879. In his chapter on the use of paper for identification documents—and the counterfeiting and forging of such documents—Basbanes gains permission to visit but not photograph the restricted spy museum at CIA headquarters, and later still he goes to see the massive pulping operation where the NSA disposes of something like 100 million highly sensitive documents a year.

This, really, is only the beginning. Basbanes’ interest in paper is encyclopedic. He writes informatively about everything from paper trails to red tape, from the technical issues of papermaking to the high art of origami, from paper’s use in warfare and sanitation to the American revival of handmade craft papers. He is particularly adept at reminding us that there are fascinating personalities engaged in every facet of papermaking and paper. His research strategy, he says with a nod to Graham Greene, has been to evoke “the human factor” behind all this activity.

Basbanes also writes, “My driving interest points more to the idea of paper, one that certainly takes in the twin notions of medium and message but that also examines its indispensability as a tool of flexibility and function.” Readers will likely finish On Paper newly appreciative of not only paper’s flexibility and function but also its ubiquity. They will also likely conclude: A paperless society? Not in my children’s children’s lifetime.

In 1945, four things happened: We dropped a bomb (well, two), a sailor kissed a girl, a war ended and the world got back to making automobiles, airplanes and transistor radios. Or at least, that's how most recall that year, if we think of it at all.

But reality doesn't work that way, even when we try to make it. Year Zero: A History of 1945 is Ian Buruma's stark look at the final year of World War II, when most wanted to see the world start over so that life could get better. That it did not get better, and for many became much worse, even as leaders and politicians promised the opposite, forms a central element of Buruma's account. His own father was a Dutch "DP"—a "Displaced Person"—one of millions of refugees, slave workers and concentration camp survivors scattered around Europe (and Asia) by the war. He becomes the human link to Buruma's tale, the reminder that human faces underlie the big events, and that the machinations of diplomats and dictators, however cloaked in idealistic language, have results that in the end are highly personal, whether fortunate or tragic.

This is not a book in praise of heroes; there are few, and many who might be heroes in one light are tainted by gross abuses in another. Nor is it a book that lauds a generation or a nation or even an ideal; rather it is look at reality, or at least the reality that can be recalled. At times Year Zero is as harsh as the reality it exposes; one cannot read the litany of deaths, rapes and cruelties that continued after the war supposedly ended without feeling horror, however fascinating the account may be.

And it is fascinating, not just for the tragedy it contains, but also for the seeds of hope. For as much as the book is about human reality, it is also about our unreality—the ways people find to survive, even coming to believe that perhaps the world can indeed "start over" and be better than it was before. "What is history, but a myth agreed upon?" Napoleon allegedly observed. Year Zero is a reminder that sometimes we consciously make that myth, in hopes that this time it might come true.

Howard Shirley is a writer and history enthusiast living in Franklin, Tennessee.

The next time someone complains that letter writing is a lost art, thanks to email and Facebook, and that people simply don't communicate as frequently or as thoughtfully now as they did in the good old days, you can hand them a copy of Writing on the Wall, Tom Standage's entertaining and thought-provoking survey of the ways that various social media have developed and evolved since Roman times until now.

Conducting us on a fascinating journey through the back roads of media history, journalist Standage (The Victorian Internet) traces the development of social media to Cicero, who constantly exchanged letters with friends around the Roman Empire so that he could keep up with its political affairs and daily activities. He then chronicles the development of social media from the circulation of Paul's letters in the early Christian communities and the deluge of printed tracts in 16th-century Germany, to the exchange of gossip-laden poetry in Tudor courts, John Donne's practice of circulating his poetry as a means of self-promotion and the establishment of Enlightenment-era coffeehouses that provided the social context and literary atmosphere for writing and exchanging news sheets and pamphlets.

Standage contrasts social media with mass media, which developed in the mid-19th century and which delivered information or social propaganda in an impersonal manner that did not foster conversation among individuals. Contrary to mass media, "social media are two-way, conversational environments in which information passes horizontally from one person to another along social networks, rather than being delivered vertically from an impersonal central source."

As the public became disenchanted with mass media in the 21st century, new forms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter developed and provided individuals with a way to disseminate information about politics and other matters quickly and broadly to their societies. As an example, Standage points to the use of Facebook, YouTube and other social media as instrumental in the revolutionary movement of the Arab Spring that began in 2010.

Standage concludes that "whatever form social media takes in the future, it is clear that it is not going away. Blogs are the new pamphlets; microblogs and online social networks are the new coffeehouses. They are all shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the bottleneck of social broadcast media." After reading this stimulating survey, you’ll be hard-pressed to disagree.

As December 1914 drew to a close in Europe, neither side in the war, which had begun in August, had managed a strategic breakthrough. Any early romantic ideals of war by soldiers and civilians had been replaced by terrible realities: death, destruction, suffering and hardship for thousands. In Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, a deeply researched and eminently readable overview of the breakdown of diplomacy and the first five months of conflict, military historian Max Hastings expertly explains the events of the war up to that point. Of the many theories of the origins of the war, he thinks the only untenable one is that it was the result of a series of accidents. “The leaders of all the great powers believed themselves to be acting rationally” and pursuing attainable objectives, he argues. He prefers the term “deniers” for those leaders rather than “sleepwalkers,” which indicates they were not conscious of their decisions.

Hastings details the evidence that shows that, although other nations were responsible in some ways, Germany bore principal blame for starting the war. The great question for him is: Who was making key decisions in Germany about going to war? Many in Europe assumed there would be a war, and it is a myth that many expected it to be a short one; in fact, soldiers everywhere anticipated a protracted conflict. Even though the horrors they experienced in those first few months diminished much of their early enthusiasm, nations which have paid the huge moral, political and financial price for entering a conflict are rarely interested in stopping as long as they think they have a good chance of winning.

“A dominant theme of the campaigns of 1914,” Hastings writes, “was the mismatch between the towering ambitions of Europe’s warlords, and the inadequate means with which they set about fulfilling them.” Among other concerns, there were chronic shortages of food, clothing and weapons. Thousands of draught and pack animals were used for every form of transport and were often victims of incompetent or brutal handling. Telephones, a major means of communication, were in short supply.

Commanders on both sides greatly underestimated their opponents. All of the armies involved had an exaggerated belief in human courage and the will to win, believing that those qualities could overcome the power of modern technology. On August 22, the French army lost 27,000 men, casualties on a scale never surpassed by the army of any other nation in a single day of the war. The best estimates are that France suffered well over a million casualties (killed, wounded, missing or captured) in the first five months of the war, including 329,000 dead. The Germans had 800,000 casualties during that same period.

The author’s broad canvas includes discussions of important subjects, such as the crucial role played by the Royal Navy in denying victory to Germany in 1914 by keeping Allied commerce going. He notes that Great Britain was the only major power to have a parliamentary debate on entry into the war, but the lawmakers were not invited to vote on the matter. There is a focus on the Serbian and Galician fronts, usually not well known by Western readers. Other subjects include civilian atrocities, war profiteering, class distinctions and harsh discipline in the military.

Hastings has been a foreign correspondent and a newspaper editor and is the author of several highly acclaimed works, including Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945. He gives us a realistic and unsentimental view of war and its consequences not only for combatants, but also for the civilians who were caught up in circumstances that changed their lives forever. This excellent authoritative account is a major triumph.