The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. The boys, both children of college professors, grew up on the same short street sharing a love of basketball, standup comedy, Doc Savage mysteries and the great expectations of their families. The two best friends were also keen competitors, though Michael was a gifted extrovert, with a photographic memory and confidence to burn, and Jonathan was intensely shy and shadowed by his father's Holocaust trauma. When they both got into Yale, they seemed set to ascend to the heights of the American meritocratic elite.
Leaving Jonathan behind, Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job for far more money than their parents had ever made. But all wasn't as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the fateful call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was institutionalized at a New York City psychiatric hospital where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He would stay there for nine months before transitioning to a halfway house.
Fearing the prospect of a life spent bagging groceries, Michael decided to play the one card left to him: just before his break, he had been accepted to Yale Law School, and now, against all odds, he planned to enroll. Still struggling mightily with schizophrenia, Michael made it through the top law school in the country. His extraordinary story was featured in the New York Times; an agent sold his memoir to a major publisher for a large sum; Ron Howard swept in to acquire film rights, and Brad Pitt was set to star. It was all a dream come true for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, and no longer medicated, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.
The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. His exploration is rooted in the dramatic transformation of American culture in the second half of the twentieth century, society's shifting relationship to mental illness and the marriage of law and psychiatry. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community, the promise of intellectual achievement and the lure of utopian solutions. At times tender and hilarious, and at times harrowing and almost unbearably sad, The Best Minds is an extreme version of a story that is tragically familiar to all too many. In the hands of a writer of Jonathan Rosen's gifts and dedication, its significance will echo widely.