The Best Minds
A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN AND PROSPECT'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, ATLANTIC, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL’S TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR
'Extraordinary... Magisterial... A remarkable meditation on friendship, success, madness and violence that refuses to oversimplify' Guardian (Book of the Day)
'The darkest of literary triumphs, and the most gripping of unbearable reads' Telegraph (5 stars)
A novelist's gripping investigation of the forces that led his childhood best friend from academic stardom to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved
When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University.
Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa c*m laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating call: Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and living in a halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enroll. Still battling delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star. But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort.
The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's powerful account of an American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dazzling memoir, essayist Rosen (The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature) chronicles his thorny relationship with his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a lawyer and disability rights advocate who made headlines in 1998 for murdering his fiancée during a paranoid episode. The boys met as neighbors in a tight-knit New Rochelle, N.Y., Jewish community and attended Yale University together. Laudor graduated in three years but quickly began having delusions, carrying a baseball bat to bed at his parents' house because he believed they'd been replaced by Nazis. He was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and Rosen traces Laudor's cycles of recovery and relapse with an empathetic but still circumspect eye, charting the impact of Laudor's disease on others, including his law school dean, rabbi, and the officer who arrested him after the murder. Rosen also takes a sweeping look at shifting views on mental illness, from the political revolutionaries of the 1970s who aligned an open embrace of mental illness with communist philosophy to the deinstitutionalization trend of the '80s. This lands as both a breathtaking and tragic portrait of a man with vast potential and a reckoning on how schizophrenia is treated and understood. This is a tough one to forget.
