The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood [Paperback]

ANew York Times Book ReviewEditors' 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'sThe Hollypresents a dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future.

On the last evening of summer in 2013, five shots rang out in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an invisible city within a historically white metropolis. While shootings there werent uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered anti-gang activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the states most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun?

InThe Holly, the award-winning Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events that left a local gang member paralyzed and Roberts facing the possibility of life in prison. Much more than a crime story,The Hollyis a multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. With a cast that includes billionaires, elected officials, cops, developers, and street kids, the book explores the porous boundaries between a citys elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and exgang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. InThe Holly, we see how well-intentioned efforts to curb violence and improve neighborhoods can go badly awry, and we track the interactions of law enforcement with gang members who conceive of themselves als3