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There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir Kindle Edition
Casey Gerald
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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
“At first glance, Gerald’s story might read as inspirational: A gay black boy born into poverty goes on to Yale, a Harvard M.B.A., and Wall Street. But this memoir is light on triumph and heavy on fatalism, complicating the bootstrap narrative of his life.” – New York Magazine
“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
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 --This text refers to the hardcover edition.About the Author
From School Library Journal
Product details
- File size : 3777 KB
- Publication date : October 2, 2018
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 400 pages
- Publisher : Riverhead Books (October 2, 2018)
- ASIN : B079WNQFZQ
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Language: : English
- Lending : Not Enabled
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Best Sellers Rank:
#251,150 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #346 in Discrimination & Racism (Kindle Store)
- #369 in African American Studies
- #595 in Law Enforcement Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
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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.
especially his pronouncements about god, the world, and others. Heard him pontificating on All Things Considered and thought either the memoir would be amazing or terrible. How do you do well at Yale without ever reading a book?
A good lesson on how being labeled from the beginnng as Special in a cruel and racist world can destroy the self and lead to a life of faking it.
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