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The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood Audiobook
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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for General Nonfiction Winner of the 2022 High Plains Book Award for Creative Nonfiction Now the basis for an investigative documentary of the same name, award-winning journalist Julian Rubinstein's The Holly presents a dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future. On the last Friday evening of the summer of 2013, five shots rang out in the parking lot of a new Boys & Girls Club in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the Holly had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun? In The Holly, the award-winning journalist Julian Rubinstein, who grew up in Denver, reconstructs the events leading up to the fateful confrontation that left a local gang member paralyzed and Terrance Roberts on trial, facing a life in prison. Much more than the story of a shooting, The Holly is a multigenerational crime story that explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens, as well as the fraught interactions of police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex-gang members trying—or not—to put their pasts behind them. It shows how well-intentioned urban renewal may hasten gentrification, and what happens when overzealous policing collides with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders, however imperfect, of a neighborhood. In the era of Black Lives Matter and urgent debates about the future of policing, Rubinstein offers a nuanced and humane illumination of what’s at stake. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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“Illuminates the dynamics that help explain the Black rage that has spilled into American streets over the past two years.”
— Los Angeles Times
Quotes
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“[Rubinstein] helps us realize that the problem of violence is far greater than two men and one gun.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“A gripping deep dive into media underreporting and too-quick judgment.. Dramatic and wrenching.”
— Booklist (starred review) -
“Sets its events against the backdrop of broad social and political changes.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“Offers profound insights into the forces that plague America’s inner cities.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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About Julian Rubinstein
Julian Rubinstein is a journalist and the author of Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, which was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Best Fact Crime award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine, as well as in Best American Crime Writing. He is a visiting professor of the practice of documentary journalism at the University of Denver.