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 … 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 Underland
Kerri 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?more
Essentail American Reading .
3.5 stars. Well-written, and I enjoyed hearing it read by the author. The book was a bit meandering, mixing history, science, research, economics and Arsenault’s own family story together into a tale about growing up in a small, rural one-industry town and the economic, environmental and health consequences. It’s sad, but unfortunately, it’s nothing we don’t already know: industry pollutes, those who have the gold make the rules (the golden rule), and we the people pay the price.
I received a free electronic copy of this excellent personal history from Netgalley, Kerri Arsenault, and St. Martin’s Press on August 13, 2020. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this history of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. Kerry Arsenault writes a compelling, heartfelt personal history of generations of her family and friends that grew up in a northern Maine paper mill town.
Maine’s infamous Cancer Valley includes the towns of Rumford and Mexico, Maine which were the single employers were major producers of paper and paper products. Unfortunately, the valley involved earned its nickname. Cancer diagnoses, treatments, and deaths are many times that of ‘normal’ residential areas – communities not reliant on single employer big business to survive. Paper mills were bad, as were chemical plants, mining concerns, even cloth manufacturing.
Arsenault shares with us her family history as it evolves around the side-effects of life surrounded by the constant side-effects of giants in the paper business in a world that had no thought or care for the future of the family or even the earth. The world was much smaller and more remote back in the day, and few if any towns were concerned with unchecked pollution of air and water and it’s effects on employees and communities. This is a nightmare that is still happening in some areas. When is the cost of employment more important than that of health? How much must we sacrifice to bring home that paycheck? Ms. Arsenault shows us where we must in the future draw the line. If only we could see it through all the Corporate DoubleSpeak and BS…
MEmoir/ History / Political Treatise… all in one package. I’ll be honest, I picked up this book thinking it would be a bit closer to my own history of being in and around a mill town. In my case, the actual mill town was, by my time – roughly when Arsenault was graduating HS – , just a neighborhood of a larger County seat town it was founded just outside of around the same time as the mill Arsenault writes about. I know what it is like to live in such an area and have the mill be such an important aspect of your life, and I was expecting a bit more of an examination of that side of life. Which is NOT what we get here. Instead, we get much more of the specific familial and mill history of Arsenault and this particular mill and its alleged past and current environmental misdeeds. We even get a screed against Nestle along the way, and even a few notes of misandrist feminism. Also quite a bit of heaping of anti-capitalist diatribe, all tied up in Arsenault’s own complicated emotions of being someone who cares about her home town, but who it was never enough for. (The exact dichotomy I was hoping would have been explored directly far more than it actually was, fwiw, as that is exactly what I struggle with myself.) Overall, your mileage may vary on this book depending on just how ardent you are in your own political beliefs and just how much they coincide with Arsenault’s own, but there was nothing here to really hang a reason on for detracting from the star level of the review, and hence it gets the full 5* even as I disagreed with so much of it and was so heavily disappointed that it didn’t go the direction I had hoped. Recommended.