When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, there was no outpouring of collective grief. The archduke was not charismatic, had few friends and was selected as heir only because the emperor’s son had committed suicide. How could his death have led to a war into which the major world powers—Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, Britain, Italy, plus the Ottoman Empire and the states of the Balkan peninsula—were soon drawn? How did a conflict that was first known as the Third Balkan War mutate into what we now call World War I, a war in which more than 15 million people were killed and empires were destroyed? Noted historian Christopher Clark is keenly aware of the difficulties in finding answers to these questions. As he writes in his painstakingly researched, masterfully written and wonderfully readable new book, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, “There is virtually no viewpoint on its origins that cannot be supported from a selection of the available sources.”

In this ambitious and richly textured overview, Clark is more concerned with how the war came about than why. Rather than focus on large concepts, such as nationalism, imperialism or an arms race, he deals with how the key decision-makers arrived at the choices they made when faced with the 37-day July Crisis that led to war. Clark goes back to the years before the war, in some cases many years before, to understand the alliances or treaties that bound certain states together. As he explains, “Alliances, like constitutions, are at best only an approximate guide to political realities.”

Readers are introduced to a large and diverse cast of decision-makers, many of whom had known each other for years. Because of these long-term relationships, Clark writes, “Beneath the surface of many of the key transactions lurked personal antipathies and long-remembered injuries.” The best known of these were the three imperial cousins: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and King George V of England. As we see, though, the early 20th-century monarchs only had a relatively modest impact on actual policy decisions. Often it was ambassadors or military commanders who either developed policies or took policy-driving initiatives.

Article 231 of the Versailles Peace Treaty stated that Germany and her allies were morally responsible for the outbreak of the war. But Clark argues that “the Germans were not the only imperialists and not the only ones to subscribe to paranoia. The crisis that brought war in 1914 was the fruit of a shared political culture.” He brings that culture vividly to life for readers. The Sleepwalkers is certainly one of the best books on World War I to be published in recent times.

One can have the benefits of a first-class education these days and still be oblivious to the name and exploits of the Victorian-era explorer Paul Du Chaillu. He was the man who plunged into the jungles of Gabon, West Africa, in 1856 and, three years later, brought back—first to America, then to England—the skins and stories of a theretofore legendary creature: the gorilla. Those unfamiliar with the man would do well to pick up a copy of Between Man and Beast, Monte Reel’s new book about Du Chaillu’s life and adventures in pursuit of this fierce creature.

Returning from his travels the same year Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Du Chaillu’s own origins were murky—and remain so today. He was probably born on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, the illegitimate son of a French father and a mixed-race mother. While still in his teens, he came under the care of an American missionary in Gabon, who taught him English and eventually helped him get a job teaching French at a seminary in New York. During his tenure there he wrote a series of newspaper articles about his time in Africa. The articles eventually attracted the attention of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which agreed to sponsor his 1856 expedition.

Du Chaillu’s written account of his travels—buttressed by the physical evidence supporting it—quickly became a bestseller in England and catapulted the author into the center of scientific and religious debates about man’s relationship, if any, to other primates. It also exposed his shortcomings as a scientific observer, deficiencies which he was determined to mend by leading a second expedition into the same harsh territory.

Although Du Chaillu’s checkered life story is the bedrock of this book, Reel builds upon it fascinating sketches of England’s leading intellectuals, explorers and freelance eccentrics of the day, detailing not only their personal achievements but their professional jealousies as well. And he has plenty of tales about how “gorilla mania” saturated English culture via the publicity attending Du Chaillu’s discoveries. Through it all, Du Chaillu stands as a sincere, endlessly curious but often naïve witness to the human folly that surrounds him.

Since her retirement from the Supreme Court in 2006, Sandra Day O’Connor has given prominent support to the improvement of civics education, with special focus on the role of the judiciary in American government. Out of Order is fully in keeping with that mission. With a brisk pace and a conversational style, Justice O’Connor’s book succeeds in giving the reader an accessible view of how the court works and how it has changed over time.

Out of Order opens with a vignette about O’Connor’s first trip to the Supreme Court as a “simple tourist,” decades before she became the first woman to ascend to its bench. Now invested with 25 years of experience and a passion for the court’s history, her book is aimed at readers who, like her at one time, might never have hoped to get closer to the court than its marble steps. We learn of how justices were once expected to log hundreds of miles on horseback each year to hear cases in other courts around the country. We hear about notable court cases and discover how they affected the course of American history. We meet great oral advocates and charismatic judges, and we get an inside view of judicial humor and the rituals that permeate the court. Though close followers of the court will be familiar with much of this material, O’Connor provides tidbits of trivia that may surprise even the winner of your local law school’s fantasy Supreme Court league. Who knew that Justice Rutledge could not attend the August 1790 session because he was incapacitated by gout?

It is worth noting what this book is not. It does not provide any commentary on contemporary judicial debates, nor is it colored by O’Connor’s opinions. Indeed, the book’s tone is such that the reader may sometimes forget that the author is a person who lived the history she’s writing about. But what Out of Order does do is provide a clear, informative and entertaining lesson in history and civics. Those searching for a fundamental understanding of the Supreme Court will do well to turn to this volume.

“Maps hold a clue to what makes us human,” Simon Garfield writes in the introduction to his lively, loose-limbed exploration of our seemingly tireless quest to visually represent the lay of the land. Garfield’s interest in the human side of mapmaking—the personalities, anecdotes, curiosities—is what makes On the Map such an enjoyable read.

Garfield’s 22 chapters follow a rough chronology, beginning with the Great Library of Alexandria, where Eratosthenes of Cyrene in the third century B.C. came remarkably close to calculating the true circumference of the earth, and ending with contemporary medicine’s attempt to map the human brain. In between, he regales readers with tales of mapmakers and map thieves, treasure maps, the origins of the atlas and the development of the beautiful schematic map of the London tube. Who was Mercator and why do we think his distortion-filled map is so important? How did the Americas come to be named after Amerigo Vespucci, a former bank clerk who sailed for South America nearly a decade after Columbus reached the Caribbean? Why did a nonexistent mountain range remain on maps of Africa for almost a century? The answers can be found in On the Map.

An Englishman, Garfield’s topic selections skew toward the British, but On the Map also includes chapters on the grid map of Manhattan and the mapping efforts of the Lewis and Clark expedition (with an interesting aside on Native Americans’ evanescent sand maps). So On the Map is capacious rather than comprehensive. It is also vastly entertaining.

Ever since Cain and Abel, societies have been shaken and shaped by brothers who competed with, supported or blithely ignored one another. George Howe Colt, the second-born of four brothers, has plowed through history to describe these powerful and perplexing sibling dynamics. He does so within the framework of recounting the ups and downs of fraternal relationships that prevailed inside his own family.

While Colt’s personal accounts of growing up and finding his place in the pecking order are the most vivid and psychologically revealing, he interlaces them with extended close-ups of brothers Edwin and John Wilkes Booth; John and Will Kellogg (of Kellogg cereal fame); Vincent and Theo van Gogh; John and Henry David Thoreau; and Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo Marx. He found that brothers tend to heighten certain qualities in each other—good and bad—that might have lain dormant if not for that incessant grind of proximity.

George’s older brother, Harry, first served the role of hero. Then, when they were at Harvard together, Harry’s seriousness as a student became a living reproach to George’s hard-drinking, devil-may-care ways. More readjustments lay ahead as younger brothers Ned and Mark came along to fight for their own identities. As the author tells it, harmony now reigns among the Colts. Harry became a doctor, George a writer (whose 2004 book The Big House was also a family history), Ned a reporter for NBC and Mark, “the least competitive of the brothers,” a recycling coordinator at a school for the blind.

Brothers is meant to charm with its stories, not to be a template for predicting behavior. “Over the past three decades,” Colt writes, “studies of intelligence, personality, interests, attitudes, and psychopathology have concluded that siblings raised in the same family are, in fact, almost as different from each other as unrelated people raised in separate families.” Maybe so, but at least they’re around when you need someone to play catch with.