![There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir by [Gerald, Casey]](https://web.archive.org./web/20200117140038im_/https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41exuLSYwIL._SY346_.jpg)
Casey Gerald, the author of this magical mystical tour, is a Yale grad, football star and business maven who was raised in poverty. In his 30s, he is still defining himself by a standard that includes equal parts angst, irony and glimmers of hope.
Casey’s father was a football star back in the day when black college players were a rarity. He was also absent for much of his son’s adolescence, reappearing as a reformed addict whose redemption was sufficient to earn him a role as an evangelical preacher. Casey’s mother also disappeared, her reasons never fully defined and her reemergence in his life fraught with misunderstanding. A sister was an example and a mainstay for the young man grappling with big issues. The family lived in public housing in a black section of Dallas, yet Casey somehow got the impression that being black in the US was a positive. It wasn’t until his college years that he began to understand that being black might mean having “so little money in our bank accounts, so little food on our tables, so few books in our classrooms…”
In a series of remarkable coincidences, the boy who played football in the projects was drafted to play football for Yale, where he found out that he could write. By that time, he also had realized that he was gay, giving him yet another barrier to push back at. In the later stage of his college career, he became a campus leader of his African American cohort and was a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. Free from the restraints of education for a while, he drifted, but got back into the swim with an MBA from Harvard; helped found MBAs Across America, aimed at helping people in the hinterlands make it as entrepreneurs; and then took a sabbatical from everything else to write this hugely fascinating autobiography.
Casey’s professors at Yale were certainly correct: the man can write. His stream-of-consciousness tell-all style captures the reader from the opening segment in which he explains the book’s title (no spoilers here). He can make almost any subject simultaneously painfully hilarious and wistfully sad, as so much of his life has encompassed that paradox. He confesses that when asked, as part of his interview for a Rhodes scholarship, what book he had most recently read, at that point he had never actually completely read any single book, though he did delve into such diverse tomes as BLACK LIKE ME and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. In speaking of his highly dysfunctional family, Casey depicts their interactions as something like “a blaxploitation Fellini movie.” Yet his spiritual side is quietly evident at times. There is one family member, a cherished niece, who he refuses to sully with his sorrow or his sarcasm, because “I like that baby.”
This is a life in progress, one senses, rather than a mere memoir. The reader undoubtedly will feel that, as much as Casey Gerald can and will retreat into his mental world again and again, he is also destined and determined to do good things and take justifiable pride in their accomplishment.
Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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 ReviewFrom 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
