Short Takes
Thirteen Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings
By Philip Caputo
Chamberlain, 198 pp., $21.95
The Vietnam years: To nostalgic baby boomers they were the best of times and the worst of times. To the dry-eyed Philip Caputo, linked inextricably to that period by his best-selling account ''A Rumor of War," they were simply the worst of times. They reached a nadir on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of students, mostly passersby, killing four and wounding nine.
By the time Caputo, a cub reporter fresh out of the Marine Corps, reached the campus that day, the ''massacre" was over. But the soul-searching was only beginning, and the investigations -- oddly and, Caputo believes, suspiciously inconclusive -- still lay months and years in the future.
An essay wagging a long tail of appendices, ''Thirteen Seconds" serves, essentially, as liner notes for the accompanying DVD of the documentary film ''Kent State: The Day the War Came Home." It would be a shame to treat the text as mere wrapping paper, however, for Caputo recalls the catastrophe with immediacy and passion. The lessons he draws from these events about citizenship and democracy remain as timely today as they were when other conflicts and other leaders filled the headlines.
The Sad Truth About Happiness
By Anne Giardini
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., $23.95
Although this is her first novel, Anne Giardini brings to the trade an enviable pedigree -- her mother was the novelist Carol Shields -- and, more to her own credit, a confident voice and a luminous, lyrical prose style.
The heroine and narrator of Giardini's debut novel is 32-year-old Maggie Selgrin, placid and content but not, she admits in responding to a magazine quiz, truly happy, a realization that comes as a shock when the quiz predicts that she has only a few months to live. Has she lived at all yet? she wonders. Her last romance ended a while back. She has a useful if not very cheerful job as a mammogram technician in Vancouver, her lifelong hometown. Maggie needs to engage more with the world, she decides. She needs an adventure. When her tempestuous sister Lucy returns home from Italy, furious -- and pregnant -- after a disastrous love affair, the opportunity for a gallant grand gesture presents itself.
At this point the plot takes a turn that strains credulity, for all the loveliness of Giardini's narrative style. By novel's end, Maggie has recouped her serenity and a larger measure of that elusive thing, happiness, albeit gained, we can't help but observe, at others' expense.
A Perfect Red
By Amy Butler Greenfield
HarperCollins, 338 pp., $26.95
For centuries red was the color of European royalty, whether of church or state. The dyestuffs that produced a rich and lasting, brilliant blood red were rare and costly, a sumptuary luxury available to only the lofty few, and a trade secret protected by dire penalties. This intricate history, subtitled ''Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire," shows how the demand for that ''perfect red" intersected with the rise and fall of the great maritime empires.
The Spaniards were the first to lay claim to the riches of the New World. The humblest though by no means the least of those riches was cochineal, an insect that, when crushed, yielded a red dye quite literally to die for. Despite the machinations of conquistadors, spies, alchemists, and imperial entrepreneurs, the bug stubbornly refused to thrive anywhere but in the idyllic climate of southern Mexico, where Aztec farmers had cultivated it for centuries. With insight into personal greed and folly as well as a detailed grasp of fact, Amy Butler Greenfield paints a broad historical panorama, never neglecting the intimate, eccentric, and often absurd human details.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
