I do believe that Ms Guiliano, my sixth grade Social Studies teacher, is the one who tried to impress upon the class that history was not a bunch of dates and names and battles to be remembered. History was the story of people and The Most They Ever Had is a great example of what my teacher meant. The Most They Ever Had is the story of a community in Jacksonville, Alabama whose economy, whose lives, were predicated on cotton. The Profile cotton mill offered more than jobs for people, it offered them an opportunity to reach for the American Dream. For eighty years, Jacksonville's destiny revolved around cotton and the mill. Then the mill closed and the world as they knew it, ended. Far from being an affectedly sentimental memoir about his hometown, Rick Bragg narrates his book with affection and candor (and a nice soft Alabamian drawl.) It's not a ploy for sympathy so much as a nod of recognition towards the proud people who worked hard and, deserved dignity; but whose culture was destroyed in the name of global economics. While the book chronicles the history of the Alabamians who signed on at the Profile, the specific lot of a Southern community, the story is really about a lot of people, including the New England textile workers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the timber and lumber communities of today that stretch from Tunkhannock, PA to Southern Oregon, the citrus grovers from Florida to California and, even Silicon Valley. Just something to think about the next time you go to Wal-Mart and you buy a tee-shirt for $2.99: How much is it really costing you? ( )

Bragg writes about Appalachian poverty so well that you can hear the southern drawl, see the rough, calloused hands, watch as the moonshine slides down the throat, observe the bare light bulb hanging by a thin cord from the ceiling of the tiny mill owned shacks that teeter on their foundations.

Mainly, the reader cannot help but feel tremendous respect for the honest, integrity filled, salt-of-the-art people who helped to shape this country by their toil.

Bragg is one of my favorite authors, and while his subject matters are difficult and heart wrenching, I'll continue to read as long as he writes.

In this latest work, he chronicles the history of the mills that maimed, that filled the lungs with unfiltered cotton dust and robbed the workers of life and breath.

These same mills that brought death, gave hope to the workers who stood in line to obtain a chance for a job. Working long, hard, grueling hours for pittance, the company store took the money long before it was earned.

This book is an excellent slice of American history, including the necessity of unions, and the people who lost life and limb in the mills, only to see the mills closed as cheaper labor was obtained overseas.

Highly recommended. ( )

A slim volume of stories about the Fruit of the Loom manufacturing mill and workers in Bragg's hometown of Jacksonville, Alamaba, which shaped the town and when it closed re-shaped it again. Interesting, touching in places, but not Bragg's best work. ( )

I listened to this book on tape, read by the author. I enjoyed his voice and the sincerity of the performance. The book itself is at war with itself. Bragg, on one hand, bemoans the closing of the cotton mills of the mountain country of Alabama. He tells, movingly, of the shock to the system and the blow to the pride of the people of the mill when the closures occur. Globalization is the culprit, taking these jobs overseas and away from families whose lives revolved around the cotton mill. However . . . Bragg also describes the gruesome cost of the mills (brown lung disease, mutilation by machines) in detail. Okay, the modern mill is safer than the mill of 1930, but it is nevertheless difficult to mourn the closing of these places. Bragg makes us feel the inhuman pace, the inhuman noise, the mind-numbing sameness of the work. Sad that they closed . . . glad that they closed. I guess my final feeling is that what happened to the mill workers was unfair to them, but I'm glad for their children that the mill is no longer an option. ( )

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. ( )