There Will Be No Miracles Here

The testament of a boy and a generation who came of age as the world came apart--a generation searching for a new way to live.

Casey Gerald comes to our fractured times as a uniquely visionary witness whose life has spanned seemingly unbridgeable divides. His story begins at the end of the world: Dallas, New Year''s Eve 1999, when Casey gathers with the congregation of his grandfather''s black evangelical church to see which of them will be carried off. The journey that follows is filled with yearned-for arrivals and unexpected, often devastating departures. His beautiful, fragile mother disappears frequently and mysteriously; for a brief idyll, he and his sister live like Boxcar Children on her disability checks. When Casey--following in the footsteps of his father, a gridiron legend who literally broke his back for the team--is recruited to play football at Yale, he enters a world he''s never dreamed of, the anteroom to secret societies and success on Wall Street, in Washington, and beyond.

But even as he attains the inner sanctums of power, Casey sees how the world crushes those who live at its margins. He sees how everything becomes possible for the elite, and how they perpetuate the salvation stories that keep others from rising, that aggrandize themselves, that protect the ever-more-untenable status quo. And he sees, most painfully, how his own ascension is part of the scheme.

There Will Be No Miracles Here has the arc of a classic rags-to-riches narrative, but it stands the American Dream narrative on its head, arriving at a more timely, subversive, and truly revelatory end. If to live as we are is destroying us, it asks, what would it mean to truly live? What would it mean to be truly free? Intense, incantatory, shot through with sly humor and quiet fury, There Will Be No Miracles Here inspires us to question--even shatter--and reimagine our most cherished myths.