Winner of the 2013 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction - a poignant, darkly comic debut novel about a father and son finding their way together as their livelihood inexorably disappears When Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams returns to the family farm in eastern Colorado to bury his dead cat, he finds his widowed father, Emmett, living in squalor. There’s no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated the senile Emmett out of the majority of the farm equipment and his beloved Cessna. Unemployed and without prospects, Shakespeare settles in as caretaker to both his dad and the farm while simultaneously getting drawn into an unlikely clique of former classmates. Threatened with the farm’s foreclosure, Shakespeare, Emmett, and his misfit friends hatch a half-serious plot to rob the very bank that stole their future.

By the 1870s, the word was out about Colorado. East coast and Midwest prospectors, European immigrants, and African Americans newly freed from slavery, rushed to Denver to find work and their fortune in silver and gold. Captured here in almost 200 vintage images is the story of the African Americans who escaped the oppression and racism of the post Civil War South, and created a city within a city: the Five Points neighborhood of Denver. Named in 1881 for a bustling five-way intersection, the Five Points area became the commercial and social sector for African American churches, businesses, clubs, and homes, and the heart of Denver's black community. Showcased here are the photographs of once thriving Five Points businesses in the Welton Street business district, such as Otha Rice's Tap Room and Oven and the Rossonian Hotel, as well as the familiar faces of the Cosmopolitan Club, Madame CJ Walker, and Dr. Justina Ford, Denver's first African-American female doctor.

An award-winning journalist’s 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.

"Within Denver's C-470 loop, numerous trails and neighborhoods invite exploration. Includees 30 hikes throughout the urban core, including Golden, Aurora, Westminster, Arvada, Littleton, and Thornton. Special coverage of the 9 Creeks Loop, a 41-mile urban hike on Denver's best trails." -- Back cover.

Denver enters the Noir Series arena with a wide range of mile-high misgivings and perils. “Denver Noir presents an impressive range of perspectives and observations. Between the writers and their characters, you’ll encounter dozens of distinct and compelling relationships with this place. Maybe you’ll start to see our city—and even yourself—in new ways.” —Denver North Star “Denver Noir is a fascinating exploration of this sunny city’s dark side. Mountain views, a roughneck Gold Rush past, and stories of murder and mayhem make this anthology a must-read for anyone curious about Denver and its environs. Like the countless entries before it, Akashic Books allows an editor to craft an anthology filled with stories varying in tone and perspective.” —New York Journal of Books Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Peter Heller, Barbara Nickless, Cynthia Swanson, Mario Acevedo, Francelia Belton, R. Alan Brooks, D.L. Cordero, Amy Drayer, Twanna LaTrice Hill, Manuel Ramos, Mark Stevens, Mathangi Subramanian, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Erika T. Wurth.

Travel guide book inspired by the gold prospecting origin of Colorado. Includes touring information on all the major towns founded as gold mining camps as well as summaries of each town's origin story. Includes reviews and recommendations on historic districts to visit, mines to tour, driving tours of ghost towns and places to gold pan. Includes information on 16 historic districts, 31 museums, 18 mines, 186 gold panning sites across the state of Colorado. Thoroughly researched to confirm public access to the panning sites (no private property or areas subject to mining claim has been included - unlike other books.)Written by a long-time Colorado resident and gold prospector. Based on years of research and field work.Get your share of the gold by prospecting for it in historic, urban, and remote locations across the gold districts of Colorado.

Transference of orientalist images and identities to the American landscape and its inhabitants, especially in the West—in other words, portrayal of the West as the “Orient”—has been a common aspect of American cultural history. Place names, such as the Jordan River or Pyramid Lake, offer notable examples, but the imagery and its varied meanings are more widespread and significant. Understanding that range and significance, especially to the western part of the continent, means coming to terms with the complicated, nuanced ideas of the Orient and of the North American continent that European Americans brought to the West. Such complexity is what historical geographer Richard Francaviglia unravels in this book. Since the publication of Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, the term has come to signify something one-dimensionally negative. In essence, the orientalist vision was an ethnocentric characterization of the peoples of Asia (and Africa and the “Near East”) as exotic, primitive “others” subject to conquest by the nations of Europe. That now well-established point, which expresses a postcolonial perspective, is critical, but Francaviglia suggest that it overlooks much variation and complexity in the views of historical actors and writers, many of whom thought of western places in terms of an idealized and romanticized Orient. It likewise neglects positive images and interpretations to focus on those of a decadent and ostensibly inferior East. We cannot understand well or fully what the pervasive orientalism found in western cultural history meant, says Francaviglia, if we focus only on its role as an intellectual engine for European imperialism. It did play that role as well in the American West. One only need think about characterizations of American Indians as Bedouins of the Plains destined for displacement by a settled frontier. Other roles for orientalism, though, from romantic to commercial ones, were also widely in play. In Go East, Young Man, Francaviglia explores a broad range of orientalist images deployed in the context of European settlement of the American West, and he unfolds their multiple significances.