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Mill Town
- Reckoning with What Remains
- Narrated by: Kerri Arsenault
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
"This is a listen for anyone interested in small-town America, how it's changed, and why it matters...Though Arsenault may not be a professional narrator, her passion for these important stories comes through with just the right amount of sincerity." (AudioFile Magazine)
This program is read by the author.
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 her 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, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.”
Mill Town is an personal investigation, where Arsenault sifts through historical archives and scientific reports, talks to family and neighbors, and examines her own childhood to illuminate the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease.
Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks: Whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year - 2020
Barnes & Noble Best New Books of the Year - 2020
Chicago Tribune Best Books of the Year - 2020
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
"While this is a portrait of a town in decline, it’s also a paean to the community that cared for it and those who have remained there, including Arsenault’s own classmates, friends, and family. The author’s unusually quiet, tender reading evinces that love, while also clearly setting that affection against the brutality of the forces that have laid Mexico low." (Booklist)
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Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
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a beautiful story
- By Pumpkin99 on 12-24-22
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Mercy Among the Children
- A Novel
- By: David Adams Richards
- Narrated by: Bernard Clark
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Sydney Henderson is a truly great man. As a young man, Sydney, believing he has accidentally killed a friend, makes a pact with God, promising never to harm another if the boy's life is spared. In the years that follow, the almost pathologically gentle Sydney holds true to his promise - at terrible cost to himself and his family. Stunningly beautiful and haunting, scenes from this magisterial novel will remain etched in the mind forever.
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Epic story
- By jhar14 on 06-04-22
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Because Our Fathers Lied
- A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today
- By: Craig McNamara
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright, Craig McNamara
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Craig McNamara came of age in the political tumult and upheaval of the late '60s. While Craig McNamara would grow up to take part in anti-war demonstrations, his father, Robert McNamara, served as John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense and the architect of the Vietnam War. This searching and revealing memoir offers an intimate picture of one father and son at pivotal periods in American history. Because Our Fathers Lied is more than a family story—it is a story about America.
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Title Does Not Reflect Scope of the Book
- By Amazon Customer on 07-15-22
By: Craig McNamara
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Strange Stones
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage - a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of his work. Over the last decade, as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books, Peter Hessler has lived in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions.
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funny, entertaining
- By Katherine on 08-02-13
By: Peter Hessler
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The Cubans
- Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times
- By: Anthony DePalma
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Anthony DePalma
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long.
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The real Cuba
- By Tinkerbell on 10-11-20
By: Anthony DePalma
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The Lost Boys of Montauk
- The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind
- By: Amanda M. Fairbanks
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In March of 1984, the commercial fishing boat Wind Blown left Montauk Harbor on what should have been a routine offshore voyage. Its captain, a married father of three young boys, was the boat’s owner and leader of the four-man crew, which included two locals and the blue-blooded son of a well-to-do summer family. After a week at sea, the weather suddenly turned, and the foursome collided with a nor’easter. They soon found themselves in the fight of their lives. Tragically, it was a fight they lost. Neither the boat nor the bodies of the men were ever recovered.
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Little substance.
- By Mary Katherine doyle on 06-05-21
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The Quiet Zone
- Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence
- By: Stephen Kurczy
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In this riveting account of an area of Appalachia known as the Quiet Zone where cell phones and Wi-Fi are banned, journalist Stephen Kurczy explores the pervasive role of technology in our lives and the innate human need for quiet.
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Pretty good, but a niche interest
- By Dan on 02-16-23
By: Stephen Kurczy
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Home Baked
- My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
- By: Alia Volz
- Narrated by: Alia Volz
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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During the '70s in San Francisco, Alia's mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia's future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life. Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.
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Everything and more
- By Becky Love on 10-20-24
By: Alia Volz
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Miracle Country
- A Memoir
- By: Kendra Atleework
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Kendra's family raised their children to thrive in this harsh landscape, forever at the mercy of wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Most of all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But it came at a price.
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The best memoir I've read
- By Patricia on 08-15-20
By: Kendra Atleework
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Heartwood
- The Art of Living with the End in Mind
- By: Barbara Becker
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With a keen eye toward that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom, and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways.
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The author’s compassion
- By Amazon Customer on 04-16-24
By: Barbara Becker
What listeners say about Mill Town
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Suzanne T Langlois
- 11-14-20
So Many Threads to This Story
Arsenault’s story isn’t just one story: it has numerous historical tributaries, each compelling—individual, family, Industrial, cultural. She considers her subject from many angles, and resists the urge to make it neat. The tension between a healthy economy and human and environmental health is made palpable. And while such a story can’t always be beautiful, Arsenault’s telling (and reading) of it is.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Beth
- 06-23-24
Compelling past, present and future
I don’t live extraordinarily far from Rumford. In fact, my father worked in the papermill across the river from my home when I was a child. You could see the smoke stacks from the backyard under the 100 year old willow tree. This book really makes you think of what was done to our beautiful Maine land and what will become of it for our own children. I’ve always wondered (jokingly) what was in the water in my small town to make the special ed class my daughter is in so incredibly large and I now I know there really might be something in the water…
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- E. Greene
- 09-05-22
A Gut Punch Account
Beautifully written account of the poisoning of a community by a long-established, profitmongering paper mill.
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- andy diaz
- 12-17-22
Eye-opening book
I really read this book as curiosity. My daughter selected this audio book as an assignment from UCLA. She used my account to get this book and so I said what the heck might as well listen to it. It’s scary to know that there is so much toxicity in our environment. This was truly an eye-opener. I definitely recommend this audiobook.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-02-24
Poignant and important book
Wonderfully written and read story of an under appreciated topic near to many of us who grew up in New England.
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- barbara
- 10-02-20
An extremely important book for any American
This book has really woken me up to aspects of everyday pollution that have gone unnoticed, under-reported, and suppressed. Kerri Arsenault has lost family members to cancers caused by the paper mill in her town. She tries to uncover the truth behind the pollution caused by the mill, and other mills like it, and generalizes her investigations into dioxin pollution and chemical pollution, and the toll that pollution has taken on local populations who are often under-informed or misinformed about the effects of this pollution. To give one very tiny example, lobster meat and particularly the green tamale that is coveted by many lobster-eaters is very likely filled with harmful dioxins. And this is just the beginning.
I appreciated Ms. Arsenault's attempts to shine light on these harmful practices. I particularly enjoyed the parts of the book that covered the science of pollution and cancer. I was fascinated to learn of the Machiavellian attempts of corporations to strongarm their destructive policies and manipulate small-town politicians to achieve their ends. However, I struggled mightily with listening to Ms. Arsenault's speaking voice--she isn't a born narrator and her cadences and raspy voice are grating and off-putting. Unfortunately, she often digresses into trivia that distract from the important throughline of the book. But having said that, I am very grateful for her attempts to expose these hidden cancer-causing and disease-causing practices that lurk unnoticed and unspoken in our midst, and hope that, like Rachel Carson and others before her, these messages will be heeded by the general public. This book should be a rallying cry for citizen awareness and action. Corporations and public agencies like the Federal EPA and the Maine DEP have utterly failed us.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-01-20
True, sadly true.
When I moved to Maine 40 years ago I lived on Water street in Rumford - the air from the mill permeated the town. Water from the laundromat never removed the stink of the Mill from my clothes. Years later, my husband has lost a mother, father, sister to cancers. He fights his own battle with the disease. Than you Keri for this book.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-07-21
Not my writing style but a great story!
The writing seems a bit convoluted but it is a great left-wing version of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.
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- julofmaine
- 08-06-21
It makes you think!
It’s a must read for anyone who ever Wondered if they were breathing clean air And how safe we all are in our daily lives.
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