Winner of the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award Winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First Book Finalist for the 2021 New England Society Book Award Finalist for the 2021 New England Independent Booksellers Association Award A New York Times Editors’ Choice and Chicago Tribune top book for 2020 “Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” —Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland Kerri Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to its demise. Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

Occupying only 1.6 square miles in central New Jersey, the town of Milltown has seen the surrounding area change from rolling farmland into a home from industry, commerce, business and suburban developments. In one hundred years, the town has shared the changes that have come to Middlesex County and yet still maintained that old-fashioned, small-town feeling. Those who have spent their lives here and those who have come to adopt Milltown as their own will find in this book snapshots which together take us on a journey through Milltown's history, from the days of Bergen's Mill and trolley cars, through the arrival and departure of the Michelin Tire Company, and all the way up to the 1960s. The human side of town's rich and diverse history is also well documented, with images of the famous “Milltown tranquilizers,” the diner, and the old swimming hole.

The Milltown Boys at Sixty is a story like no other, giving both an insider and an outsider view of the ‘Milltown Boys’, exploring the nature of an ethnographic relationship based on research about their experiences of the criminal justice system. A group classically labelled as delinquents, drug-takers and drop-outs, the Boys were also, in many different ways, fathers, friends and family men, differentially immersed in the labour market, in very different family relationships and now very differently connected to criminal activity. Williamson has written books capturing their experiences over the fifty years of his continued association with them: about their teenage years; and twenty years later, in middle-age. This book is about them as they pass the age of 60, providing a personal account of the relationship between Williamson and the Boys, and the distinctive – perhaps even controversial – research methodology that enabled the mapping of their lives. It provides a unique and detailed insight into the ways in which the lives of the Milltown Boys that started with such shared beginnings have unfolded in so many diverse and fascinating ways. These accounts will be of interest to the lay reader curious about the way others have managed (or failed to manage) their lives, the professional who works with those living, often struggling, on the wrong side of the tracks, and the academic researching and teaching about social exclusion, substance misuse, criminal justice transitions and the life course.

The greatness of America is right under our feet. The American past—the people, battles, industry and homes—can be found not only in libraries and museums, but also in hundreds of archaeological sites that scientists investigate with great care. These sites are not in distant lands, accessible only by research scientists, but nearby—almost every locale possesses a parcel of land worthy of archaeological exploration. Archaeology in America is the first resource that provides students, researchers, and anyone interested in their local history with a survey of the most important archaeological discoveries in North America. Leading scholars, most with an intimate knowledge of the area, have written in-depth essays on over 300 of the most important archaeological sites that explain the importance of the site, the history of the people who left the artifacts, and the nature of the ongoing research. Archaeology in America divides it coverage into 8 regions: the Arctic and Subarctic, the Great Basin and Plateau, the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, the Midwest, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest, and the West Coast. Each entry provides readers with an accessible overview of the archaeological site as well as books and articles for further research.

In The Algebraic Mind, Gary Marcus attempts to integrate two theories about how the mind works, one that says that the mind is a computer-like manipulator of symbols, and another that says that the mind is a large network of neurons working together in parallel. Resisting the conventional wisdom that says that if the mind is a large neural network it cannot simultaneously be a manipulator of symbols, Marcus outlines a variety of ways in which neural systems could be organized so as to manipulate symbols, and he shows why such systems are more likely to provide an adequate substrate for language and cognition than neural systems that are inconsistent with the manipulation of symbols. Concluding with a discussion of how a neurally realized system of symbol-manipulation could have evolved and how such a system could unfold developmentally within the womb, Marcus helps to set the future agenda of cognitive neuroscience.