He had just started an entry-level woodworking program. Yet while it may not have come across in his demeanor, he was determined to remake his life. It was hard to read him, especially given his reticence. He had a shaved head and a light beard and seemed preternaturally calm, almost sphinxlike. George, who was thirty-nine, had put on weight in prison and was a bear of a man, the extra pounds piling around his center. Talese/Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. It felt less like a celebration of what could be than a reminder of what was.įrom AN AMERICAN SUMMER by Alex Kotlowitz.Ĭopyright © 2019 by Alex Kotlowitz. The constant noise, mostly men arguing and complaining in abundantly loud voices, was a vestige from their time in prison. As part of his release, the authorities required him to stay six months at this halfway house run by the Salvation Army, a decaying three-story red-brick building on the city’s near West Side. Five months earlier, George had been released from a federal prison in West Virginia after serving ten years for possession of a handgun while guarding a heroin sale. He wanted to do nothing to alter its impermanence. And a Fender bass guitar leaning against a wall. A portable color television and a radio, along with three cans of pop and a bag of potato chips, sitting atop a scratched wood desk. A dog-eared Bible resting on a bedside table. George Spivey purposefully kept his room bare.

An American Summer by Alex Kotlowitz