My Grandfather’s Mill – Journey to Freedom is a true story — part history, part biography. It focuses on two families and their two infant children, Andrew and Chrystyna, born in Western Ukraine at the height of the Second World War. Their parents fought for Ukrainian independence throughout the years of Polish occupation, the invasion of Stalin’s Bolshevik forces and during the years of Hitler’s Nazi terror. Members of both their families were murdered by one or another of the occupying armies. Family accounts of concentration camps, refugee camps; of war crimes, brutality and uncertainty, of hope, courage and unexpected generosity are interwoven with the historical realities of the time. They were among the lucky ones who found freedom in North America. Half a century after they left their homeland, Andrew and Chrystyna returned. They discovered the villages of their birth, found family members they didn’t know existed, experienced their culture fi rst-hand and fi nally began to make sense of their place in history. This book is written for future generations, for all those who have lived in two very different worlds, for victims of wars, present day refugees, immigrants and especially for those who were born and have always lived in a free country and never experienced the horrors of war.

His book is unique because of the stories that turn us back to the past and explain to children some other world that they do not remember and that is specific because of many things. Less things and more happiness. All other books today talk about technology, future or imaginable things and this has a powerful idea : To tell children that happiness is something that we make and that all sad and happy thoughts come from us and our head. This book is divided on chapters and every chapter has its own story. It got a great reviews and children were very satisfied with it. For the main themes it has: love, parents and childhood, happiness and friends, games without technology...

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?

Downeast Maine is fairly rural today. Imagine trying to eke out a living 240 years ago in an area where there were no roads, no towns, no stores, no hospitals, no amenities whatsoever. This is the world into which my family settled into during the post-Revolutionary War era. Maine was simply a province of Massachusetts until 1820, and even then, the area of Hancock County, east of the Penobscot River, was lightly settled. By the time my grandfather Ellis Hollis Saunders was born in 1895, civilization had made its way to Downeast Maine. He was the recipient of three generations' hard work to establish a farm and lumbering business; however, much work would be laid at his feet in his youth, followed by being drafted to go to France in World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and finally old age. He passed away when I was only five years old in 1968, a man worn down by a life of hard work in an attempt to give his family more than he had achieved during his lifetime. He left me a gift when he passed away, the only new vehicle he ever purchased: a 1968 C10 Chevy pickup. His gift would provide me transportation when I was growing up but ultimately a way out of depression after the passing of my parents. Restoration of his truck in 2021 helped restore my spirit in my own life as I moved forward with my own family.

"Child uses her grandparents' story as a gateway into discussion of various kinds of labor and survival in Great Lakes Ojibwe communities, from traditional ricing to opportunistic bootlegging, from healing dances to sustainable fishing. The result is a portrait of daily work and family life on reservations in the first half of the twentieth century"--

Abdullah's willingness to negotiate sometimes made him a lonely figure in a world where compromise is deemed worse than death. His assassination in 1951 at the hands of an extremist seemed to sound the death knell for peace.