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...