Library x Mountainfilm Town Read: The Holly book giveaway & author talk!

8:00 AM - 9:00 AM

Event Details

Join the library & Mountainfilm in featuring The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood by Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein (more info on the book below.) Then please drop by the library to claim your FREE hardback copy of The Holly. We'll have 12 copies to give away, so it's first-come first-served,  but we will also have books & audiobooks available to borrow in our catalog. Or opt to buy your own from our local independent bookstore, Between the Covers!

However you choose to read, and regardless of your book progress, you're invited to join for an open-to-the-public author coffee talk on May 28th, from 8-9am, at the Hotel Telluride. The talk will feature the author, Julian Rubinstein, the book's leading subject, Terrance Roberts, and other special guests. This discussion is not to be missed- centering the Black culture & economics in Denver, the history of entrenched racism in government & policing, musings on justice work in systemically marginalized communities, and the continuing, on-the-ground work being done to bring equity to our own state capitol and its neighborhoods. 

About the book: 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.
Event Type(s): WPL Programs
Age Group(s): Adult

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