As I immersed myself in these dozens of photos from the past year, I kept thinking about what happened to my Aunt Shirley and her family more than 30 years ago. I was a senior in college when she and three of her children were murdered by an arsonist who set fire to their tenement in Haverhill, Mass. What I recall most intensely from that dark week is one of Shirley’s younger sisters seething in front of the television cameras from Boston, keening with tears of rage and grief, craving revenge.

Over and over, as I looked at these photographs, I saw the same fury and misery that had stricken Aunt Shirley’s sister, her feral lust to get even.

I saw it in Aleppo and Nairobi, in Boston and Tehran. I saw it after typhoons and tornadoes, in refugee camps and in the rubble of collapsed buildings. But I learned as I looked that it’s better to see the living shackled to the rack of their unspeakable emotions than to watch those who are entombed in blank stoicism.

Also, these photos make the reader more human amid the infinite bombast of our electronic infotainment. The mind-numbing media avalanche threatens to make war, terrorism and catastrophe banal, to turn the maimed and the dead into mere meat, as abstract as Lady Gaga’s gown of raw beef. What many of the pictures here do, though, is turn the shallow creeks of the general into the profound deeps of the particular — shocking us awake.

The year, of course, wasn’t all blood and guts, and these photos reflect that, too: ballgames were played, marriages made, Shakespeare performed — whether the government shut down or not. I found myself hooked hardest by those images that seized the rare quiet moment, scenes that pirouetted away from hype and cliché, showing us at our most human, and our most vulnerable:

• A 10-year-old boy named Issa lugs a mortar shell in a weapons factory run by the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo. The photo looks as if it were taken in some post-apocalyptic dystopia.
• Mariano Rivera, after the last game he pitched at Yankee Stadium, humbly walks into the shadowy tunnel. No. 42, baseball’s greatest closer, is a man of deep faith who understood that his unlikely gift was, of all odd things, throwing a baseball. And he transformed it into a special ritual that transcended balls and strikes.
• Corey Adams, of California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, sits on a stump, staring at a fire smoldering near Yosemite National Park. It’s as if he wearily and warily understands that the flames are obliged to burn, just as he is obliged to monitor them, in a new kind of “American Gothic.”
• An Afghan girl reads a book in front of her class in Parwan Province. She and her female classmates are the true change in 2013, the future. It’s not made up of AK-47s and tank shells, razor wire or nerve gas — but girls, suffused with hunger and hope, drinking their fill from the bottomless well of words and, perhaps, wisdom.

— Dana Jennings