The Most They Ever Had

Rick Bragg

4.2

1,963 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 1441707859 ISBN 13: 9781441707857

Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks, 2009

In these real-life stories, Rick Bragg brilliantly evokes the hardscrabble lives of those who live and die by an American cotton mill. In 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills had come to the edge of all they had ever been. Across the South, padlocks and chains bound the doors of silent mills. It seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville, Alabama, that their mill still bit, shook, and roared. The mill had become almost a living thing, rewarding the hard working and careful with the best payday they ever had but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, or more. They served it even as it filled their lungs with lint and shortened their lives. In return, it let them live in stiff-necked dignity in the hills of their fathers. This is a mill story, not of bricks, steel, and cotton, but of the people who suffered it in order to live.

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About the Author:

RICK BRAGG is the author of three best-selling books, Ava s Man, All Over but the Shoutin , and The Prince of Frogtown. As a feature writer for the New York Times, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his elegantly written stories about contemporary America. He divides his time between New Orleans and his native Alabama.

From AudioFile:

Rick Bragg warns us in his introduction that these are not happy stories, and he is right. They are, however, stories worth hearing and knowing, in the tradition of James Agee's LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. Bragg's work memorializes the community of Jacksonville, Alabama, and its way of life, and he reads it in its own voice and language. Southern speech doesn't rush, and it may take a while to get used to Bragg's pace and pauses. But he grew up among the mill hands he writes about and, while he doesn't distinguish the different characters as an actor would and doesn't always make clear where quotations begin and end, he does bring them lovingly to life. D.M.H. � AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

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