Review by New York Times Review
THERE WE WERE, about a thousand people gathered at the 2016 TED conference, waiting for the very last speaker of a weeklong lineup of exceptional humans. The session's host announced that the speaker would be Casey Gerald, who swaggered onto the stage, an athletically built, baldheaded and clean-shaven black man dressed in all black. Gerald stood, backdropped by velvet curtains, waited for the applause to quiet, and then began sharing an anecdote about the time when, on New Year's Eve 1999, he sat in a church with his grandmother and her congregation, fearing that when the clock struck midnight, the rapture would commence. Gerald went on to share stories from a journey that began when he was a boy in a blighted Dallas neighborhood and spanned up to his role as the cynosure of a room comprising no small number of the 1 percent. Near the end of his talk, Gerald announced the disbandment of MBAs Across America, an organization he cofounded to connect business students with entrepreneurs around the country. He also proclaimed that he was shirking the role of savior that had been foisted upon him, "because our time is too short and our odds are too long to wait for second comings, when the truth is, that there will be no miracles here." Gerald's magnificent memoir, "There Will Be No Miracles Here," opens with the same anecdote that began his TED talk, though in the book, he punctuates the retelling by announcing a kind of thesis. "Mine, then, is the story of a peasant boy...and, with luck, God and His miracles or lack thereof," he writes. Indeed, in just over three decades, what a phenomenal life the self-proclaimed peasant boy has lived. He spent his early childhood in Ohio, where his father had been a football star at Ohio State University. When Gerald was 8 years old, his father moved the family, which includes his older sister and mother, back to their hometown - the Oak Cliffneighborhood of Dallas. Back home, Gerald's father began working for his father, who is, as Gerald puts it, involved in "the greatest business in America: the business of saving souls." The successes of Gerald's grandfather proved enough to turn Gerald's father into his "supplicant." Meanwhile, Gerald's mother, whom he describes as a woman of curious habits, stayed at home applying makeup for a fair amount of the day. We learn early on that she suffered from manic depression and bipolar disorder, that his father developed a drug habit, one that landed him in prison, and that his older sister assumed the role of his caretaker. Gerald's mother disappeared later, leaving him to wonder for years whether she had died. Around this time, Gerald started to explore his sexual identity with the help of a new thing called the internet. He did it in secret, since, as he puts it, "I was in the early stages of crafting a new life, or a new story, in the image of perfection." He also began playing sports, although his athletic success wasn't immediate. In a hilarious passage, he describes a youth football game where the defense kept blocking his end-zone attempts right around the line of scrimmage. "Goddamn it, son!" his coach said. "Listen to me. You're embarrassing yourself. You're embarrassing your family. Get your ass low, keep your eyes open, and run for your life!" Gerald lived an itinerant existence in high school until his sister, who had briefly escaped to college, returned to Dallas and insisted the two live together. They scraped by until Gerald came up with a scheme to supplement his sister's meager income by cashing the disability checks of their missing mother. After a year of this, the siblings discovered the account had been shut down, a fact that ended their hustle but also suggested their missing mother was alive. His sister located her in St. Louis, and they drove to pick her up. While all of this domestic chaos was going on, Gerald evolved into a celebrated scholar athlete, one recruited by the Yale University football team. And though he hadn't heard of Yale before that recruitment, he decided to attend the school in the belief that his acceptance had transmuted him into a symbol, into the great pride of his school, town, people. It didn't take long after he arrived at Yale for Gerald to divine the ethos of the students and, in particular, the apparent class divide among the black students, who were invested, he writes, "in the distinction between their kind and mine." He couldn't shake his feeling of alienation from people he imagined would help him: "The more time I spent in their midst, the more I became convinced that they were the problem - not any individual boy or girl or mother or father but the ideas that they represented, of a class apart, and all the trappings that came with it: the mixer, the galas, the networking reception, the panels to discuss blackness in theory when actual blackness was having one hell of a hard time right down the street - when I was having a hard time." Fueled in part by an intent to surpass Yale's black bourgeoisie, he and a few friends established the Yale Black Men's Union. He later joined Wolf's Head, one of the college's oldest and most esteemed secret societies. Meanwhile, his football cohort matured from a crew of bench warmers into starters on some of the best teams in Yale history. Gerald became not only a team star but a finalist for the Draddy Trophy, which honors the nation's top scholar athlete, as well as a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. One of the book's most engrossing moments involves the crisis of having his Rhodes interview scheduled on the same day as the Yale-Harvard game. At times Gerald moves too quickly to the next scene or idea, when he might have benefited from a more sustained explanation of his thinking. On the other hand, he just might have crafted a consummate 21st-century memoir for readers whose brains have been rewired by Google, their attention always under siege. Gerald also pushes stylistic conventions, with short passages where he writes about himself in the third person or directly addresses the reader. He includes metanarratives as well as letters, emails and speeches. And ever present is the enchantment of his voice, one that is at turns exuberant, humorous, unsentimental, imaginative, keen. While Gerald's style is engaging, the locus of the book is his extraordinary journey. Though the chronology is a little unclear regarding the end of his time at Yale and beyond, his odyssey includes tenures in Massachusetts, New York, Washington, D.C., and back home in Texas. It leads him to Lehman Brothers right before their 2008 collapse, then to one of Washington's most influential think tanks, then to Harvard Business School, where he and a few peers founded MBAs Across America. 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. For instance, he writes that America is "ruled on the surface by people with authority, ruled in fact by people with power - people, often, in the shadows." A few years before Gerald suffered the terror of believing he'd been leftbehind in the rapture, his fifth-grade teacher assigned him to write a speech titled "I'm the Mayor Now and This Is My New Plan." Gerald explains that since he was unsure whether he had to deliver the speech from memory, he "assumed the worst." He enlists some of his sister's friends to help him brainstorm and writes the speech from his notes. The next day, he recites it in class without botching a single word. He's insouciant about the deed but his teacher screeches her astonishment. "One night, in slavish fear, I got my homework so wrong that it was perfect," he writes about the experience. Gerald might have once seen himself as a peasant boy, and maybe deep down still does. But his life, and this memoir, serve as proof of his prodigious talents, of the truth that, for the gifted like him, struggles that range from a serious hardship to a little mistake can yield something miraculous. 'I was in the early stages of crafting a new life, or a new story, in the image of perfection.' MITCHELL S. JACKSON is the author of "The Residue Years."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Gerald opens his memoir by describing himself at age 12, sitting in a church pew in great anticipation of the impending Rapture. When the clock turns and 1999 becomes 2000 and he and his fellow congregants remain, is he relieved, or disappointed? Gerald then looks back at the beginning, as he remembers it. His mother struggled with mental illness and disappeared before he was a teenager, while addiction gripped his father, an Ohio State football legend, leaving Gerald in the rotating care of his fierce older sister, his grandmothers, and other family and friends in his Dallas neighborhood. He became a star student and football player in high school before excelling, on the field and off, at Yale, where his accent and baggy clothes are the first, and not nearly the last, things that separate him from his peers. 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. Also an accomplished public speaker, Gerald will hook readers with richly layered writing on poverty, progress, race, belief, and the actual American Dream.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Reflecting on subjects such as race, religion, manhood, sexuality, poverty, and politics, Gerald (cofounder, MBAs Across America) brings readers into his life as he waits for the rapture of Y2K, the supposed end of the world. When that doesn't happen, he ruminates on his childhood as a "nobody in a family big on somebodys"-attending his grandpa's church, living in his dad's shadow, and coming to terms with his mom's absence. His writings range from meditations on whether he was living in sin for questioning his faith and hiding his sexuality to observations on playing football in high school and college in order to fulfill the family legacy. The strongest chapters look back at the author's time at Yale University, sparing his family the racism he experienced as well as the isolation that came along with being a black gay man in a predominantly white space. Later sections detailing his foray into investment banking and politics sometimes struggle to maintain the momentum, but Gerald still manages to draw us in, haunted by the death of a friend and the loneliness of failed relationships. VERDICT Similar to Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Gerald's work offers a wide-ranging, hard-to-define memoir of family, identity, and belonging.-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus 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.The narrative opens in 1999, with the 12-year-old author waiting for the end, praying nervously in his grandfather's evangelical church before the turn of the millennium: "Lord, please take me with You when You come. That is all I have to ask of God, and I will get my answer soon. It is 11:57." When midnight passes without incident, the meaning of the book's title becomes manifest. The son of a star quarterback, Gerald grew up on the poor side of Dallas, where he also excelled at football, and he soon moved on to the distant planets of higher education and elite society. As he writes, "I have been so many things along my curious journey: a poor boy, a nigger, a Yale man, a Harvard man, a faggot, a Christian, a crack baby (alleged), the spawn of Satan, the Second Coming, Casey." The author deftly navigates through the events shaping those identities: the months of his first true romance, his time at Yale and Harvard Business School, where he earned a master's degree in business and was a Rhodes Scholar finalist; Wall Street; and a stint in Washington, D.C., on the strong career advice to "be a special assistant to someone at the top." Along the way, Gerald examines the subtext underlying the clashing realities of his experiences and observations. "[I was] a boy defined by his circumstances," the author writes in nearly the middle of the well-paced narrative, "perhaps we all arejust seven billion Eves made from the rib of our Adam-circumstancebut why do we lie about it? Why don't we want to believe it? Is it that it shames us to admit how limited our power is, how much we can submithave submittedto the things we did not choose?"Hardly a by-the-numbers memoir, this is a powerful book marked by the author's refreshingly complicated and insightful storytelling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
