NEW YORK TIMES • September 1, 2020
In “Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains,” Kerri Arsenault documents passionate and largely fruitless attempts by a local doctor to expose the mill’s role in Rumford, Maine, in making his patients sick, along with the efforts of a handful of other residents and scientists who also tried, over the years, to hold the company to account, even as its owners denied responsibility. “Mill Town” is preoccupied with a poisonous irony: Rumford’s citizens live and work in a place that makes them unwell, yet they cling to their jobs with prideful obstinacy, ignoring patterns of illness, swallowing the mill’s denials and accepting their lot with a collective shrug that Arsenault, once she learns the extent of the cancer and the mill’s likely responsibility for it, finds mysterious and troubling.