There Will Be No Miracles Here (Gerald) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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 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
 

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] 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.
Atlantic


 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
 

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


[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


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


(Starred review) 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.… Richly layered writing on poverty, progress, race, belief, and the… American Dream.
Booklist


(Starred review) A memoir of a religious, gay black man coming to terms with his own nuanced achievement of the American dream.… Hardly a by-the-numbers memoir, this is a powerful book marked by the author's… insightful storytelling.
Kirkus Reviews