Seemingly oblivious to terrified drivers swerving out of her way, Diane Schuler serenely sped the wrong way down the Taconic Parkway in her borrowed red minivan loaded with five children.  She smashed head-on into an SUV, killing the three men in the SUV, herself, her daughter, and her three nieces.  Only her young son survived the tragic crash.  In the excellent, heartbreaking documentary There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, filmmaker Liz Garbus tries to answer this question: why was Diane Schuler – a good, responsible person – driving the wrong way?

A perfect wife.  A loving mother.  A woman who could have been voted “Mom Most Likely to Get Your Kids Home Safely” –  this was Diane Schuler; so imagine how inconceivable, how utterly beyond belief, when Diane’s autopsy revealed that she had been drinking heavily and smoking marijuana shortly before the crash.  Surely the medical examiner got it wrong, tested the wrong DNA, didn’t look for medical reasons for her wildly out-of-character actions, it just couldn’t be true, could it?

In interviews with family members and friends, medical examiners and police, investigators and journalists, filmmaker Liz Garbus pieces together the truth of what happened that dreadful day.  The tension builds as Garbus traces Diane’s movements from the moment she buckled the kids into her van at the campground, to breakfast at McDonald’s, to a gas station to look for pain relievers, to her increasingly aggressive driving and bizarre phone calls, to the final, horrifying scenes of the crash that destroyed so many lives.

Interested viewers will not want to miss the new memoir written by Jackie Hance, mother of the three little girls killed in the crash.  In I’ll See You Again, she speaks of her heartbreak and grief at the loss of her three, beautiful daughters.

Under the capable shepherding of Father Jim Brackin, the rector of Sacred Heart, and the rest of the staff, these new “second-career” seminarians will not only take rigorous academic classes in preparation for their Master’s of Divinity, but they will also be immersed in pastoral fieldwork and nurture their spiritual formation.  If they can trust the seminary process that will test their call, if they can give up control over their lives and learn self-denial, if they can make it through the academic and spiritual challenges, then in approximately four years the seminarians will be ordained as priests.

In The Collar: A Year of Striving and Faith Inside a Catholic Seminary, Jonathan Englert presents an intimate portrait of five men who have sacrificed jobs, families, and personal lives to begin their journey toward priesthood.  They will be tested spiritually and emotionally in this “boot camp” like no other, and in the end, only a few will wear the collar.

Britain’s response to Ireland’s desperation was a lesson in how not to offer humanitarian aid.  Those in charge of relief efforts saw the loss of the potato crop as providential:  they thought potatoes were a lazy man’s crop and kept Ireland tied to subsistence farming, and thus poverty.  If the small Irish farmers were forced to give up their small plots, commercial farms would bring more wealth and the peasants would work for a living wage.  The British also had a horror of the Irish becoming dependent on the government, so although aid was given to the stricken Irish, it was done with an ulterior political motive and so many strings were attached that the famine continued.  As Kelly says, tax collectors and coffin makers benefited from Britain’s relief efforts, but the rest of the people were too busy dying.

Killer Show

The excitement was palpable at The Station:  Great White, a heavy-metal band popular in the 1980s, would soon take the stage for a “monster show.”  Packed shoulder-to-shoulder into the rundown roadhouse in West Warwick, Rhode Island, frenzied concertgoers eagerly greeted Great White’s front man, Jack Russell, and screamed with excitement as Great White’s road manager ignited illegal fireworks intended to enhance the set.

Excitement soon turned to horror once patrons realized that sparks from the fireworks had ignited the highly flammable foam surrounding the stage.  As burning plastic rained down and thick blinding smoke obscured their vision, terrified patrons made their way to the only exit most of them knew about: the front door.  Here, instead of freedom, was a deathtrap; designed to slow people down to a “pinch point” for ticket-taking, the entranceway became clogged with people and soon the door was blocked with a floor to ceiling pileup.  This ghastly “human pyramid” had no chance: without a sprinkler system installed, patrons had a mere ninety seconds after ignition to make it out alive, after that there was very little chance of survival.  100 people lost their lives at The Station on that cold February night in 2003.

In Killer Show, author John Barylick describes the horror of that night and chillingly details how negligence and greed led to the disaster.  Certainly no one intended for anyone to get hurt, but many people, including the nightclub owners, Great White’s leader and road manager, and the city’s fire marshal, all played a role in the dreadful loss of life.  At times horrifying, tragic, and infuriating, Killer Show is a complete and compelling account of America’s deadliest rock concert.

About the only work that Peggy didn’t help with was the family’s surest and steadiest form of income: moonshine.  One of the most talented and capable moonshiners in the county, Peggy’s father, Charlie Allen, worked tirelessly making and distributing his moonshine, all the while hiding his stills and evading the local sheriff, who liked a nip of moonshine himself now and again, but surely did want to see Charlie Allen put away. Even being put on trial for making moonshine didn’t stop him; Charlie “did any and everything” to ensure his family’s survival.

And survival was anything but easy in rural Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s. Jim Crow was very much a fact of life, and Peggy vividly remembers the segregated movies, schools, and stores where the local black families were encouraged to open ruinous credit lines, but weren’t welcome to linger. In The Pecan Orchard: Journey of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, Peggy Allen shares the memories and stories of her youth – the hard work, colorful characters, and strict but loving parents who successfully raised thirteen children despite poverty and discrimination.

Yes, Sara well deserved her reputation as a good officer; she also earned her reputation as a lousy wife, bad mother, and uncaring daughter.  She had to separate from her husband, also a corrections officer, because they couldn’t be in the same room without fighting.  A heavy drinker who often woke up with a hangover, she spent little time with her girls and chose not to be with her mother when, sick with cancer, her mother needed her most.  Sara took great pride in her professional life, but her personal life was imprisoning her in misery.  Did she have the inner strength to choose happiness instead?

Sara Lunsford chronicles her journey through her literal and metaphorical prisons in her memoir Sweet Hell on Fire.  Candid, compelling, and, as befits a prison memoir, absolutely filled with profanity and stories of the obscene and nasty, this is a powerful memoir of a strong woman who escaped her prison and found happiness.

A Place to Land by Martha Manning is the beautiful and moving story of their journey together…as friends.

After eight months of agony and many false leads, word came from Mississippi that a boy, one strongly resembling Bobby both in description and in the circulated photos, had been found in the care of a tinker.  His jubilant parents rushed to Mississippi and, after some initial hesitation, declared that this little boy was indeed the missing Bobby Dunbar.

Ah, but was he?  The tinker, William C. Walters, stated emphatically that the little boy was Bruce Anderson, the son of Julia Anderson, and little Bruce had been in his care long before Bobby Dunbar went missing.  Julia went to Louisiana to see “Bobby Dunbar”, and, after initial hesitation on her part as well, declared that this little boy was her Bruce, not Bobby.

The mystery of the little boy’s identity factored heavily in the trial of William Walters.  In the years before DNA tests, such things as moles, eye shape, identifying scars, and misshapen toes were used as proof of identity.  Again and again, the little boy was stripped and examined, poked and prodded, questioned and coaxed, in an effort to ascertain the truth.  Both sides had numerous witnesses and affidavits to prove their case; both sides had loving mothers eager to lay claim to the boy; the fate of William Walters hinged on whether the jury believed the child to be Bobby Dunbar.

Totally engrossing, A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation by Tal McThenia and Margaret Dunbar Cutright, revisits a crime and a question of identity that would takes years to be resolved.

Squalid tenements with no running water or lavatories; women whose bodies were already worn out by caring for many children and the hardness of their lives; overcrowded rooms where pests and disease ran rampant; these were just some of the challenges a midwife might face.  The laboring mother might be giving birth to her 25^th child, or the patient might a woman with syphilis at risk for miscarrying.  The patient might be a young Irish girl forced into prostitution or a woman terrified to give birth lest her husband see that the baby clearly isn’t his because of the color of his newborn skin.  Jennifer Worth saw it all, yet she and the other district midwives capably and professionally provided prenatal visits, attended births, and visited the mothers postpartum.

The sights and smells (most of them revolting!) of 1950s London come vividly alive as Jennifer Worth affectingly shares her stories, both tragic and humorous, as a district midwife.  Undoubtedly these midwives with their professionalism, insistence on hygiene, and skillful hands, saved many a mother and baby.

Don’t miss the colorful BBC adaption of Jennifer Worth’s memoir in the new series, Call the Midwife, airing on PBS!

Only nine years old, Monica didn’t even have the words to describe to herself and others what happened to her father (“you say deceased,” her older sister Anne gently told her).  Monica, her young sisters Cathy and Betty, and her mother were all strangers to this new land of grief.  Other fathers would tenderly close ranks: fathers of friends and most importantly, her mother’s brother Father Bob (or “Fath”, as the girls joyfully called him) who, although equally bereft and emotionally fragile, cocooned the grieving family with his loving presence.

The death of their beloved president, John F. Kennedy, later that year sent the nation into mourning but for Monica and her family, the aftermath of his death brought an almost curious sense of comfort.  They felt a kinship with the Kennedys:  here was another grieving widow, here were other children mourning the loss of their father, and here was another uncle stepping up to take a father’s place.  Monica Wood’s When We Were the Kennedys is a lovely, bittersweet memoir of lost fathers, courageous widows, and a very personal Mexico.