The Best Minds

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By Jonathan Rosen

Publisher Description

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Named a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, and People

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023

“Brave and nuanced . . . an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.” —The New York Times

“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.” —The Wall Street Journal

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.

Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn’t as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still battling delusions when he traded his halfway house for Yale Law School. Featured in The New York Times as a role model genius, he sold a memoir, with film rights to Ron Howard. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed his girlfriend Carrie to death and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen’s magnificent and heartbreaking account of good intentions and tragic outcomes whose significance will echo widely.

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40 Reviews

3.5

Meredith Nedelcoff

Created about 1 month ago

Emily Clever

Created about 1 month ago

“"It was easy to feel contempt for all that, just as it was fun to laugh at the black and white photos of humorless Yale athletes from the 1920s with their Hitler Youth haircuts and Ozymandias thighs, and feel that children of the meritocracy were the rightful heirs of an ill-gotten fortune. What a strange satisfaction it was to dismiss the builders and stewards as unwanted guests--a taste perhaps, of what it felt like to have a New Testament that let you disavow the old one while quoting from it freely." "Bernofsky spoke about the human mind's unique ability to imagine something that did not exist as a necessary tool for both the artist and the scientist. It was one of those singular traits that made us human and gave us a past and a future. That was one of the reasons it was so hard to come up with medications for schizophrenia, a researcher once told me. There are no true animal models for the disease. You can give a rat cancer, but you can't give a rat a thought disorder." “Money had replaced community mental healthcare the way medication had replaced state hospitals. Medication did not go looking for those who resisted taking it, and money could not administer itself. Neither came with counseling or support. The SSI checks Michael received, and the Medicaid requirements he was eligible for, did not create a caring community or even an indifferent one. Nevertheless, checks and pills were what remained of a grand promise, the ingredients of a mental healthcare system that had never been baked but were handed out like flour and yeast in separate packets to starving people.” “Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble.” "The young man had needed psychiatric help but had received legal help. Now he needed legal help. Perhaps in jail he would receive psychiatric help." "Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the elevator floor, I had better realize that the brain isn't an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is."”

Fatin Allen

Created about 1 month ago

Multi-layered charactersBeautifully writtenDescriptive writingUnpredictableDark settingRealistic setting

Dilan Shah

Created 3 months ago

“Recounted in a chronological sense, the true story is pretty harrowing — given the grim way it ends and featured a ton of relationship and personality development prose about Michael. Sometimes a little needlessly detailed? I liked a lot of vignettes weaved together.”

Diverse charactersMulti-layered charactersDescriptive writing

Lindsey Aurand

Created 3 months ago

About Jonathan Rosen

Jonathan Rosen is the author of two novels: Eve’s Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning, and two non-fiction books: The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds and The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature. His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous anthologies. He lives with his family in New York City.