The Holly
Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood
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4.4 • 17 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 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 weren’t 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 state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun?
In The 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 Holly is 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 city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex–gang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. In The 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 as defenders of a neighborhood. When Roberts goes on trial, the city’s fault lines are fully exposed. In a time of national reckoning over race, policing, and the uses and abuses of power, Rubinstein offers a dramatic and humane illumination of what’s at stake.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Rubinstein follows Ballad of the Whiskey Robber with an engrossing investigation into why Terrance Roberts, a gangbanger turned community activist in northeast Denver, shot someone at his own peace rally in 2013. To answer the question, Rubinstein chronicles 50 years of civil rights activism, racialized poverty, drug crime, gang conflict, and urban redevelopment in the Holly, a Denver neighborhood that takes its name from a local shopping center where the police shooting of an unarmed teenager in 1968 touched off waves of racial unrest. After joining the Park Hill Bloods as a teenager, Roberts spent several years in and out of jail before a religious conversion inspired him to become a gang prevention advocate and a leader in efforts to redevelop the shopping center, which had become an open-air drug market in the 1980s and was burned down by Crips in 2008. Rubinstein contends that undercover law-enforcement activities, including the overuse of still-active gang members as informants, stoked intra-gang violence and helped create the combative circumstances that led Roberts to shoot a Bloods enforcer in self-defense. Though Rubinstein is clearly on Roberts's side, he bolsters the book's veracity with expert sociological and historical context. This vivid story of redemption and loss offers profound insights into the forces that plague America's inner cities.
Customer Reviews
Eye opening and heartbreaking while inspiring
This is a must read for anyone from Colorado or living hear or living in a city that has been gentrified at the expense of its citizens.
I’m ashamed and embarrassed to have not known this history and it’s impact on people as someone who has live in the Denver metro area my whole life.
Everyone was always said to avoid “certain parts of town” but we were to young to understand. Meanwhile the city ignored and capitalized on the communities being hurt and impacted the most.
They had someone who understood the problem and was from there and had respect and they stepped on him.
The Holly
Well written I live Denver I remember the history of Park Hill 🎯☀️All We Need is Jesus Amen 🙏🏾