On Fresh Air: “A decade ago, [Casey] Gerald was a rising star, a Yale and Harvard graduate running a celebrated nonprofit. Then he shut it all down. His new book is an argument for forging a different path.”

Gerald “has walked away from his own success twice. The first time was in 2016, at the height of everything. He was a kid from Oak Cliff, a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Dallas, who had made it out the way America tells us to make it out - a football scholarship to Yale, a job at Lehman Brothers, an MBA from Harvard. He created a nonprofit that put him on magazine covers and TED stages, with a talk viewed millions of times. He opened for President Barack Obama at South By Southwest in 2016. And there was even a New York Magazine headline that asked, ‘Does Casey Gerald Know How To Fix America?'”

“And then just like that, he shut down his nonprofit, stopped answering the phone and disappeared. His memoir, ‘There Will Be No Miracles Here,’ was his first report back. Then he went quiet again. And now, after that second long silence, Casey Gerald has returned with a book that reads less like a memoir and more like a challenge. It’s called ‘The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance.’ It’s his attempt to make sense of the choice at the center of his own life - to stop trying to convince America that he deserves a place in it and take back the authority to decide what his life is for.”