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The Most They Ever Had
| Our Price |
$ 29.00
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| Retail Value |
$ 32.95 |
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| You Save |
$ 3.95 (12%) |
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| Item Number |
1426138 |
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Item Description...
Product Description
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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Item Specifications...
Dimensions: Length: 5.8" Width: 5.2" Height: 0.7"
Weight: 0.2 lbs.
Binding CD
Release Date Oct 1, 2009
ISBN 1441707840
EAN 9781441707840
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Availability 1 units.
Availability accurate as of May 27, 2012 01:31.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
Orders shipping to an address other than a confirmed Credit Card / Paypal Billing address may incur and additional processing delay.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Bragg, A Gifted Writer Dec 29, 2009 |
| Rick Bragg is a true wordsmith who is using his gift to preserve a people. The stories tell of the history of a segment of the South in general and Alabama in particular. I find myself immersed in his ability to capture a moment, relay the vernacular or describe a location with the clarity that places me in Jacksonville, Alabama in the rise, height and decline of this time now past. I saw "the most they ever had" on the shelf, quickly bought it and started reading right away! | | | | Great book for Rick Bragg fans Dec 28, 2009 |
It's a quick read that leaves you laughing, crying and wondering how does anyone write like that. Although very poetic in his story-telling, Bragg still brings to consciousness how we as a county were quick to legislate our precious jobs overseas yet slow to protect the voiceless factory worker through the decades.
His stories about the eccentric mill manager are hilarious and leave you wondering if they could really be true until Bragg insists they are true. His other stories from the aging mill historians will leave you wondering how many other stories are treasured in the hearts of our southern elderly.
His Twain-flavored story-telling is visual and priceless. Order the book. | | | | Great Oral Histories From a Group Rarely Given Much Ink Dec 10, 2009 |
| I've been a fan of Bragg's since I read the first word he put onto the page in "All Over But the Shoutin." I went to a recent booksigning in Georgia and found him to be just as down to earth as his writing indicates. I'm glad that the millworkers had such a skillful interviewer as he talked with them about what it was like to grow up in a milltown and to work in the cotton mills that dot the south. Some stories and images will stay with me forever. | | |  | Great book Dec 9, 2009 |
The choice was to eat or breathe and if you had a family to support while living in Jacksonville, Alabama, you most likely chose to eat so you went off to work at the cotton mill everyday and breathed in the cotton lint all your life. If you were lucky your kids didn't share that fate, but most likely they did to help support the family. And often they met their life mates there and so on it went until 2001 when the mill shut down and was dismantled and shipped to other climes.
It was a hard life but all most knew and though they didn't survive well, survive they did and most couldn't have seen life any other way. | | | | Red Clay, Black Dirt Nov 27, 2009 |
I don't know what someone who is not from the South will think of this book. I am from there, from the places Rick Bragg writes about. I am from those people. I come from the red clay and the black dirt. This story of the mill people resonates in my bones, in my genes. It hums and throbs like those machines. It cuts through me like the mill whistle in my home town pierced through the air.
This is not a story about the economy. Not a microcosm for what is happening all across the country. It is a story about the people in one small mill town. It is a story about what they felt, and what they knew, and what they had to do.
It is a moving story. It is real. Bragg is eloquent as he listens to these people telling their stories, eloquent in letting their silences speak. | | | Write your own review about The Most They Ever Had
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