West Side Story, which debuted in 1958, remains a staple of high-school musical productions. The catchy songs and energetic dances disguise how dated is this “updated” version of Romeo and Juliet. But one scene will always be relevant. It comes in the second act, after hostility between Sharks and Jets has claimed two lives and threatens at least two more. “You kids!” exclaims Doc, the owner of the drug store where the Jets hang out. “You make the whole world lousy!” Action, the default leader of the gang, snaps back, “That’s the way we found it, Doc!”

In July 1995, Jeff Bezos sold his first book on an internet site called Amazon.com. True to tech-wizard legend, he shipped the volume from his garage in Seattle. Anyone with an ounce of computer savvy could have done the same, and before long many did; what set Bezos apart was his vision for online marketing.

An op-ed in The Washington Post in February stirred no small amount of comments (at least 3,000 on the WaPo page, last I looked). The writer, Ruth Marcus, was disturbed about legislative proposals to ban the abortion of babies with Down syndrome. Or, as she put it, “barring women from terminating their pregnancies after the fetus has been determined” to bear the defective gene.

Many years ago, I attended two funerals within 10 months, both for young men I didn’t know. I went for their mothers’ sakes. One was a suicide, and the pastor did his best to hang his eulogy on the scattered pegs of hope the boy left behind. By the grace of God, there were some. The other was a motorcycle accident.

This young man—I’ll call him Jason—was not reckless or negligent. According to his obituary, the truck he ran into “failed to yield.”

Beginning in the spring of 1915, the Ottoman Empire carried out a systematic extermination of Armenian Christians who occupied territory east of present-day Turkey. Over 1.5 million men, women, and children were slaughtered during a two-year period, an event credited with coining the word genocide. To this day, the Turkish government rejects that label and has made it a crime (Article 301 of the penal code) to insult the nation by mentioning it.

This January’s women’s march didn’t make as big a splash as the one a year earlier, but it drew impressive numbers, an abundance of pink hats, and a sea of signs, some of which can’t be reproduced in a family magazine. One popular slogan is printable and worth considering, though: Well-behaved women seldom make history. Curious about the origin, I discovered that it first appeared in a scholarly essay about (of all things) Puritan burial customs in 17th-century New England. Then it became a book title and eventually a rallying cry for fourth-wave feminism.

Our nonfiction selection committee chose five books published in 2017, in four categories: Real Lives, Real Adventure, Real Heart (a tie), and Science and Stewardship.