TY  - BOOK
AU  - Arsenault,Kerri
TI  - Mill town: reckoning with what remains 
SN  - 9781250155931
PY  - 2020///]
CY  - New York
PB  - St. Martin's Press
KW  - Arsenault, Kerri
KW  - Rumford Mill
KW  - Working class
KW  - Maine
KW  - Mexico (Town)
KW  - Biography
KW  - Mexico (Me. : Town)
KW  - Social life and customs
KW  - Paper industry
KW  - Environmental aspects
KW  - Oxford County
KW  - Health aspects
KW  - Pollution
KW  - Androscoggin River Region (N.H. and Me.)
KW  - Anecdotes
KW  - Rumford (Me.)
KW  - Environmental conditions
N1  - Includes bibliographical references
N2  - "A galvanizing and powerful debut, Mill Town is an American story, a human predicament, and a moral wake-up call that asks: what are we willing to tolerate and whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival? Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault's own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for that seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town's economic, moral, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname "Cancer Valley." In Mill Town, Arsenault undertakes an excavation of a collective past, sifting through historical archives and scientific reports, talking to family and neighbors, and examining her own childhood to present a portrait of a community that illuminates not only the ruin of her hometown and the collapse of the working-class of America, but also the hazards of both living in and leaving home, and the silences we are all afraid to violate. In exquisite prose, Arsenault explores the corruption of bodies: the human body, bodies of water, and governmental bodies, and what it's like to come from a place you love but doesn't always love you back"--
ER  -