Mill Town

Product Description
Winner of the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book AwardWinner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award for NonfictionFinalist for the 2020 National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First BookFinalist for the 2021 New England Society Book AwardFinalist for the 2021 New England Independent Booksellers Association AwardA New York Times Editors’ Choice and Chicago Tribune top book for 2020“Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” ―Robert Macfarlane, author of UnderlandKerri Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to its demise.Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?
Review
*Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book*Winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award“Combining personal history with investigative reporting, Arsenault pays loving homage to her family’s tight-knit Maine town even as she examines the cancers that have stricken so many residents.” ―The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)“Part beautiful memoir and regional history, part investigative journalism, part environmental diatribe countered by a poetic ode to place. In short, it’s a fraught love letter to that fragile American entity, the small, rural, working-class town….Arsenault’s prose shines…She has done immense and important research and delivered an engaging tale that deserves a close read.” ―Stephanie Hunt, The Post and Courier (Charleston)“Trenchant and aching…What Arsenault has provided is a model of persistence, thoughtful reflection and vividly human personal narrative in uncovering a heartbreaking story that could be told in countless American towns, along countless American rivers.” ―Steve Paul, Minneapolis Star-Tribune“Arsenault combines memoir with investigative journalism in this tale of the toxic paper mill at the center of her Maine hometown, an area now nicknamed Cancer Valley.” ―People magazine“Though you assume another hand-wringing over environmental deregulation, what unspools is much richer and more affecting. [Arsenault] brings the outrage of a furious native, tearing down years of “Vacationland” tourism, yet deeply homesick for the place she once knew. What gave her hometown its meaning once―industry, deregulation, community―is precisely what devoured it.” ―Christopher Borrelli, The Chicago Tribune“Mill Town is preoccupied with a poisonous irony: Rumford’s citizens live and work in a place that makes them unwell… The scale of the problem and of the potential malfeasance could not be grander or more terrifying.” ―Emily Cooke, The New York Times Book Review“With affection and concern, Mill Town recounts ‘Maine’s constant conundrum, an American story, a human predicament.' In rural, working-class towns, the presence of industry amounts to pollution, but its absence gives way to poverty. Within fence-line communities like Arsenault’s Mexico, prosperity and affliction are wholly intertwined.” ―Andru Okun, The Boston Globe“Mill Town poses hard questions that challenge the tacit acceptance of ecological destruction as the price of economic hea