About this item
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.
About the Author
Julian Rubinstein is an award-winning journalist, author and producer. His new non-fiction book, The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2021. It has received starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist, which called it "a shattering piece of investigative journalism about street gangs, race relations and law enforcement."His first non-fiction book, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, was called "an instant classic" by Canada's Globe and Mail. The book was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime Book and was a New York Times "Editors' Choice." His longform magazine work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Travel Leisure and others. His journalism has been cited and collected in numerous anthologies, including Best American Essays, Best American Crime Writing, Best American Science and Nature Writing and twice in Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Denver, and is currently a Visiting Professor of the Practice of Documentary Journalism at the University of Denver. More at www.julianrubinstein.com
