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Casey Gerald

There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir Hardcover – October 2, 2018

by Casey Gerald (Author)

360 ratings

3.7 on Goodreads

2,332 ratings

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NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
A PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB PICK

"Somehow Casey Gerald has pulled off the most urgently political, most deeply personal, and most engagingly spiritual statement of our time by just looking outside his window and inside himself. Extraordinary." —Marlon James

"Staccato prose and peripatetic storytelling combine the cadences of the Bible with an urgency reminiscent of James Baldwin in this powerfully emotional memoir." —BookPage

The testament of a boy and a generation who came of age as the world came apart—a generation searching for a new way to live.

Casey Gerald comes to our fractured times as a uniquely visionary witness whose life has spanned seemingly unbridgeable divides. His story begins at the end of the world: Dallas, New Year's Eve 1999, when he gathers with the congregation of his grandfather's black evangelical church to see which of them will be carried off. His beautiful, fragile mother disappears frequently and mysteriously; for a brief idyll, he and his sister live like Boxcar Children on her disability checks. When Casey--following in the footsteps of his father, a gridiron legend who literally broke his back for the team--is recruited to play football at Yale, he enters a world he's never dreamed of, the anteroom to secret societies and success on Wall Street, in Washington, and beyond. But even as he attains the inner sanctums of power, Casey sees how the world crushes those who live at its margins. He sees how the elite perpetuate the salvation stories that keep others from rising. And he sees, most painfully, how his own ascension is part of the scheme.

There Will Be No Miracles Here has the arc of a classic rags-to-riches tale, but it stands the American Dream narrative on its head. If to live as we are is destroying us, it asks, what would it mean to truly live? Intense, incantatory, shot through with sly humor and quiet fury, There Will Be No Miracles Hereinspires us to question--even shatter--and reimagine our most cherished myths.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Riverhead Books
Publication date

October 2, 2018
Dimensions

6.28 x 1.32 x 9.28 inches
ISBN-10

0735214204
ISBN-13

978-0735214200
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of October 2018: Casey Gerald begins and ends his passionate, voicey memoir by describing a photograph of his family taken in the early 1990s, when he was just a little boy. There’s his handsome, football-star father, his glamorous mother, his “portrait perfect” sister, and Gerald himself, with his arms outstretched like an airplane, ready to fly away. “See the family,” Gerald writes, “Savor them. Soon they will be destroyed. They will destroy each other. They will destroy themselves.” That prophetic voice, learned, perhaps, in the evangelical church Gerald’s grandfather founded, gives There Will Be No Miracles Here drama and gravity that is surprising given Gerald’s youth, but well-suited to his bust-to-boom-and-back-again story of growing up poor, gifted, and gay.

Gerald left behind his troubled family in Dallas and headed east to play football for Yale, intern at Lehman Brothers, and then study for an MBA at Harvard. A grand career in politics beckoned, but Gerald’s soul, nurtured by the language of literature (from the Bible to The Boxcar Children to The Invisible Man), proved too big for such worldly goals, and he returned to Texas to find himself. There Will Be No Miracles Here isn’t one of those memoirs politicians write before announcing an electoral run—it is something more complicated and nuanced: a depiction of the causes and costs of “upward” mobility. It’s not a prescription so much as a diagnosis, and it will leave you considering what it means to be successful, which Gerald’s memoir, by any measure, is. —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review

From School Library Journal

When the author was 12, he waited for the Rapture at his paternal grandfather's church in Dallas on New Year's Eve in 1999. The new millennium arrived, but the world did not end. Gerald's father, Rod, a former college football hero, fell from grace, succumbing to drugs and prison life. The author's mother, Debra, had mental health issues and was in and out of his life. Gerald and his older sister, Tashia, lived off their mother's disability checks. He became a varsity football star at South Oak Cliff High School and was recruited to play football on a scholarship at Yale. He entered the educational and political echelons of society, navigating power lunches, secret societies, and success on Wall Street and Washington, DC and overseas. But Gerald soon becomes aware of social inequalities. He also struggles with his burgeoning sexuality, disillusionment, and loneliness at the top. This memoir moves away from the tropes of the American dream and "succeeding against the odds." Biblical and literary references are threaded throughout. Gerald's love for American political and cultural history is astounding. Some readers will find parts hard to read, especially given the use of the N word and Gerald's portrayal as the anti-poster child of the LGBTQ communities. VERDICT An eye-opening purchase for mature teens.—Donald Peebles, Brooklyn Public Library

Review

“Stunningly original … By breaking every rule of the … genre, [Gerald has] created something unique and sublime: a beautiful chronicle of a life as yet unfinished … a shining and sincere miracle of a book.” –NPR

“Gerald writes a powerful commentary on race in America simply by telling his life story.” –Entertainment Weekly

“Undeniably inspirational...a literary and often dark look at the effects the national virtue of self-reliance can have on the people who live according to it, with particularly moving passages about the atmosphere of stress, pain, and racial divides on college campuses.” –Vanity Fair

“Gorgeously written and uncommonly insightful.” –People Magazine

“Searing . . . rendered in vivid, painful, and regularly funny reminiscence. But more than anything else, this bildungsroman is a wry document of American class strata.” – O, The Oprah Magazine

"Magnificent... at turns exuberant, humorous, unsentimental, imaginative, keen. … The locus of the book is [Gerald's] extraordinary journey. … Along the way, he learns plenty about his country, the elites who run it and the underclass subject to their rule. He often relays his insight with indelible aphorism. …His life, and this memoir, serve as proof of his prodigious talents, of the truth that, for the gifted like him, struggles … can yield something miraculous.” –New York Times Book Review

“Infuriating and deeply moving . . . It’s a rare memoirist who does not just recall, but inhabits the past, who understands that memory is a pliable thing, a means to, not the end of, a story . . . There’s a bit of Barbara Kingsolver in this, a bit of James Baldwin . . . urgent, lyrical [and] timely.” –Texas Observer

“[A] compulsively readable memoir … about coming into the light of reality in a world filled with deceit and loss, love and hope. . . . Gerald’s staccato prose and peripatetic storytelling combine the cadences of the Bible with an urgency reminiscent of James Baldwin.” – BookPage

“[Gerald] delivers a beautifully written cautionary tale about the toll taken by society even on those like him, fortunate enough to defy the tremendous odds against their success.” –Vulture

“A memoir of lacerating honesty and self-awareness, a book that lets you feel how badly the author needed to write it . . . There Will Be No Miracles Here is a portrait of a man looking for what's real, within and for himself. It's also a testament to the power of written words and the role they play in personal transformation. Reading Gerald's book is to see the author come alive, and to look in wonder at the process.” – Dallas Morning News

“A vital missive to these cracked-up times . . . Gerald nimbly avoids the twin perils of self-pity and romanticism, with writing that is muscular and direct.” – Out Magazine

“[Gerald] take[s] on the important work of exposing the damage done to America, especially its black population, by the failure to confront the myths, half-truths, and lies at the foundation of the success stories that the nation worships.” – The Atlantic

“An extraordinary portrait of what it means to live on both the bottom and the top of American life.” –Anand Giridharadas, The Ezra Klein Show

“Somehow Casey Gerald has pulled off the most urgently political, most deeply personal, and most engagingly spiritual statement of our time by just looking outside his window and inside himself. Extraordinary.” –Marlon James

“A deeply spiritual memoir about growing up black, poor, and gay in evangelical Texas; Gerald has become a superstar as a TED talker and MBA powerhouse, but this book is quiet and reflective, a document of fearless humility.” –Boston Globe

“[A] compelling look at how the elite maintain their status at the expense of others.” –Paste Magazine

“From the first line of this astonishing book, we know we are in for a trip we've never gone on before in memoir. The book braids, un-braids and re-braids threads of the personal, the political and the philosophical, in a voice that is ironically comedic and at the same time wholly sincere. There Will Be No Miracles Here is a glowing literary event.” –Kiese Laymon

“A formally inventive and lyrical memoir about boyhood, blackness, masculinity, faith, privilege, and the search for self that investigates the idea of the American dream, and how the myth of ascension–including the author’s own—is what can ultimately undo us.” –Poets & Writers

“Casey Gerald’s book is urgent, mesmeric, soaring, desperately serious, wounded and, at times, slyly, brilliantly comic. The world he creates is vivid, the invocation of the personal and the political sharp and knowing. The style is flawless, the pace perfectly judged. Electrifying.” –Colm Tóibín

“Gerald…may be a genuine visionary. His beautifully written memoir….makes a powerful argument for societal change.” –Harvard Business Review

“Bitingly humorous yet brimming with pain, Gerald's book lays bare his yearning to be ‘a normal person’ . . . As books helped save him, so may his save others.” – Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Original, important books often defy summary, and even a string of quotations can’t capture the reading experience. This is true of Casey Gerald’s There Will Be No Miracles Here...In eloquent prose, and with a fluid storytelling that helps explain the viral popularity of his TED talk, Gerald unfolds a coming-of-age tale by turns poignant and triumphant, fierce and surprising. It is a telling that hums with humor, erudition, and grace.” – Yale Alumni Magazine

“Any one anecdote from Casey Gerald’s extraordinary life could be the stuff of an entire book . . . But Gerald has something bigger in mind. He weaves these anecdotes together to make readers examine our assumptions about the classic American rags-to-riches story he so perfectly embodies — and which, he argues, is lethally dangerous to society’s disenfranchised. Read this book to rethink your definitions of success, failure, and who among us deserves which.” –Brightly

“This is the book for all of us who have juggled double (and triple, and quadruple) consciousnesses, and for those of us who have prayed to false gods and passed as false selves. Casey Gerald leads us through blackness and boyhood, love and masculinity, faith and privilege, on his journey toward the only self who could write these fierce and luminous pages. This book is fire.” –Danzy Senna

“ Gerald pulls no punches in telling his extraordinary story, which he relates with unsparing truth, no small amount of feeling, and a complete lack of sentimentality. Painful lessons dart in and pummel his unsuspecting self, and scenes of startling intensity are often pierced—and pieced back together—by light and humor…Richly layered writing on poverty, progress, race, belief, and the actual American Dream.” –Booklist (starred)

“Hardly a by-the-numbers memoir, this is a powerful book marked by the author's refreshingly complicated and insightful storytelling.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“A wide-ranging, hard-to-define memoir of family, identity, and belonging.” –Library Journal

About the Author

Casey Gerald grew up in Oak Cliff, Texas and went to Yale, where he majored in political science and played varsity football. After receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School, he cofounded MBAs Across America. He has been featured on MSNBC, at TED and SXSW, on the cover of Fast Company, and in The New York Times, Financial Times, and The Guardian, among others.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; 1st Edition (October 2, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735214204
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735214200
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.28 x 1.32 x 9.28 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #132,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #407 in Discrimination & Racism
- #494 in Black & African American Biographies
- #3,823 in Memoirs (Books)

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IrisRose

Mixed feelings about the writer

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 13, 2019

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Gerald's story is well-written, eloquent at times, with spots of humor that is not glib or cute. He has a good sense of paradox and irony. At times he tells his story straight-forwardly and objectively; at times he is emotional and even self-pitying. But it is not offensive or off-putting when he does indulge in regrets and self-guilt. At times his sense of place in this world feels tragic, at times hopeful. Ultimately, even with humor that sometimes made me chuckle, I have the sense that his story is, so far, tragic. He leaves hope, though, although that last line is something that for many years I cautioned my students not to do--promise. Anton Chekhov said, "Discard your beginnings and endings. That is when you are most tempted to lie." Gerald's last sentence immediately called that advice to mind.
Still, for the most part, I admire him: his determination, his honesty, his humor, his achievement. Of those achievements, he tells with a paradoxical and justified sense of accomplishment and pride: Yale and Harvard, after all. Yet, at the same time, he deprecates his own achievements with something akin to self-disgust. I'm sorry for that. He is entitled to give himself credit for those accomplishments.
When he discusses his relationships with people, both somewhat successful and failed, he is very hard on himself. He takes on responsibility for his admitted betrayal of at least two close friends who depended on his integrity and support, putting the goal ahead of friendship. He leaves the incidents with what he deems a failure in his humanity and does not tell the reader to what extent his project succeeded. His self-assessment is sometimes brutal, sometimes despairing, sometimes self-congratulatory, effectively tempered with that skillful tone, irony, and wryness.
HOWEVER: with all this honesty, self-loathing, and regret, he describes two unforgivable actions--in my opinion--for which he expresses no regret whatsoever. Admittedly both these sins are committed as a youth. Still, the stark single-sentence revelation of these ugly acts appalled me, and lowered my opinion of him as a person (He remains an excellent writer, in my estimation.
There is not one sentence, not one thought of regret for burning a mouse alive, and setting two fish to fight to the death, merely for his own enjoyment. These creatures were not "just a mouse--just a fish" They were living creatures who endured cruel deaths at his hands. Yes, he was just a child who had a tough growing-up--was angry etc etc. No. The acts were deplorable. What is most disgusting to me is the utter lack of feeling, conscience, or regret displayed for these acts. I cannot forgive him as a human being for these failures. He could have left the incidents out; I don't know why he did not, if he could not explain why he included them or how they affected his opinion of self. Perhaps he wanted to be judged on these acts. But such tiny sentences among the many memories and observations of human nature and his own nature. Sentences without any reflection at all. So, I am left impressed with the man's writing and his excellent accomplishments, and deeply disturbed by his failures, some self-admitted, as a compassionate and responsible human being.

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Title should be " So Much of My Life is a Miracle" by Casey Gerald.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 23, 2019

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I was captivated watching Casey's brief TV interview (Books TV, in CA). I immediately purchased his book, because I wanted to know more of his story, which is the book. Casey and I will have to agree that we disagree....my opinion is the title should be "So Much of My Life is a Miracle". Without knowing, Casey rob's himself of his own joy. I do not think it is because he is content being discontent. Quite the contrary... He simply has not acquired the cognitive tools required to live in peace in the midst of unsolved problems. I believe applying the 12-step principles, traditions, and concepts of Emotions Anonymous (derived from AA) could be a "quality of life changer" for Casey. I could be wrong. Only Casey will know if he is willing to accept the challenge and try. Then all of his heartaches and disappointments could be used to help heal the heart of the child within this human being that still hurts. Once Casey obtains and maintains with due diligence, then I believe, Casey's greater works (in writing and perhaps even as a movie, will be revealed). However, Casey's most difficult accomplishment is yet to be, peace within. That is an inside job, rather gift, that ONLY HE CAN GIVE HIMSELF. It will require total transparency, brutal honesty, and a loving kindness and forgiveness with himself and others, at a level far greater and deeper than Casey humanly has ever experienced. Casey will have to let God out of the box Casey has kept. Only when Casey is willing to let go and let his Supernatural Higher Power do through him and for him, what Casey has been unable to do for himself, will Casey have true peace and enjoy living, and being, the absolutely wonderful human being that Casey truly is. Sad thing is, Casey is not there. This story encaupulates the first decades of his life. I believe the best is yet to come! I look forward to my next read of his. He is a gifted writer, and paints with words.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 22, 2018

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There are miracles - he is on his journey and I believe he will find them!

“O LORD, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before You. Let my prayer come before You; Incline Your ear to my cry! For my soul has had enough troubles, And my life has drawn near to Sheol. I am reckoned among those who go down to the pit; I have become like a man without strength, Forsaken among the dead, Like the slain who lie in the grave, Whom You remember no more, And they are cut off from Your hand. You have put me in the lowest pit, In dark places, in the depths. Your wrath has rested upon me, And You have afflicted me with all Your waves. Selah. You have removed my acquaintances far from me; You have made me an object of loathing to them; I am shut up and cannot go out. My eye has wasted away because of affliction; I have called upon You every day, O LORD; I have spread out my hands to You. Will You perform wonders for the dead? Will the departed spirits rise and praise You? Selah. Will Your lovingkindness be declared in the grave, Your faithfulness in Abaddon? Will Your wonders be made known in the darkness? And Your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O LORD, have cried out to You for help, And in the morning my prayer comes before You. O LORD, why do You reject my soul? Why do You hide Your face from me? I was afflicted and about to die from my youth on; I suffer Your terrors; I am overcome. Your burning anger has passed over me; Your terrors have destroyed me. They have surrounded me like water all day long; They have encompassed me altogether. You have removed lover and friend far from me; My acquaintances are in darkness.”
‭‭Psalms‬ ‭88:1-18‬ ‭NASB‬‬

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Top reviews from other countries

Patricia Seeley

I worry for the author.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 5, 2019

Verified Purchase

This was a painful memoir to read and the author’s struggle to make sense of his life and find meaning in its outcome (so far — he’s still so young!) was clearly ongoing into the future. His important message is that it’s not enough for a civilization to pick a few exceptional kids to serve as symbols of “the American Dream”. He rejects his “symbol” status, but seems in the end still quite fuzzy about where to go next. I sincerely hope he chooses the path of love that seems to open up to him in the end. As literature, some of the writing sings. Love and words may open a lot of pathways for him and hey, you’re never to young or too old to choose to believe in miracles after all!

Amazon Customer

NOT AN EASY READ

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 27, 2019

Verified Purchase

I watched his Ted Talk, which was very inspiring. I bought the book to get a similar inspiration, unfortunately the book is not an easy read. The story and his message is very unclear from the beginning. Had no motivation to read the rest of the book.

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