There Will Be No Miracles Here: A memoir from the dark side of the American Dream

(Paperback, Main)

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Casey Gerald's story begins at the end of the world: on New Year's Eve 1999, Casey gathers with the congregation of his grandfather's black evangelical church to witness the rapture. The journey that follows is a beautiful and moving story of a young man learning to question the dreams of success and prosperity that are the foundation of modern America.

Growing up gay in an ordinary black neighbourhood in Dallas, his parents struggling with mental health problems and addiction, Casey finds himself on a remarkable path to a prestigious Ivy League college, to the inner sanctums of power on Wall Street and in Washington DC. But even as he attains everything the American Dream promised him, Casey comes to see that salvation stories like his own are part of the plan to keep others from rising.

Intense, incantatory, shot through with sly humour and quiet fury, There Will Be No Miracles Here is an extraordinary memoir that forces us to judge our society not on those who rise highest, but on those left behind along the way.

Reviews

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
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 Tibn
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 *
A memoir of a religious, gay black man coming to terms with his own nuanced achievement of the American dream in the new millennium ... hardly a by-the-numbers memoir, this is a powerful book marked by the author's refreshingly complicated and insightful storytelling * Kirkus *
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 *
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 *

Author Bio

Casey Gerald grew up in Dallas, 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.