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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.
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
When you were a small boy, the aim of the suitable playmate could not have been more perfectly fulfilled: across the street was Michael Laudor, the ideal friend. A brilliant peer.
-Cynthia Ozick, letter to the author
My family moved to New Rochelle in 1973. There were good schools, green lawns, and quaint signs painted in the 1920s bearing legends like only forty-five minutes from broadway and city of homes, churches and schools, though there were four synagogues and Metro North got you to Manhattan-the rock around which all life revolved-in thirty-three minutes. But the real reason we moved to New Rochelle was so that I could meet Michael.
That, at least, is what my mother's best friend, the writer Cynthia Ozick, told me:
I heard much of Michael Laudor when you were growing up. And in a way even before you knew of his existence, in this sense: that Michael, or someone like him, was always the goal in choosing where to buy a house.
Michael, in other words, was inevitable. I was destined to meet him, or at least someone like him, because friendship cannot actually be foretold any more than madness or the day of your death. Can it?
I met Michael soon after we moved in, as I was examining a heap of junk that the previous owners had left in a neat pile at the edge of our lawn. I was looking for relics of the three athletic boys who had lived there, and wondering if a small aquarium was worth salvaging, when a boy with shaggy red-brown hair and large tinted aviator glasses walked over to welcome me to the neighborhood.
He was taller even than I was, gawky but with a lilting stride that was oddly purposeful for a kid our age, as if he actually had someplace to go. His habit of launching himself up and forward with every step, gathering height in order to achieve distance, was so distinctive that it earned him the nickname Toes.
I didn't learn he was called Toes until fifth grade started, when I learned he was also called Big. The shortest kid in class was called Small, and when they lined us up in height order, Big and Small were bookends. Sensitive teachers sometimes let the short kids go first, which I'm sure did wonders for their self-esteem.
Big is less imaginative than Toes, but how many kids get two nicknames? And Michael was big. Not big like Hal, who appeared to be attending fifth grade on the GI bill, but through some subtle combination of height, intelligence, posture, and willpower.
In Brookline-the Boston suburb where my family had lived for three years before moving to New Rochelle-I'd been taller than all my friends, but nobody would have called me Big. I settled too easily at the bottom of myself in a shy sediment. Michael was only an inch or two taller than me, and just as skinny, but he seemed to enjoy taking up space, however awkwardly he filled it.
Even standing still he had a habit of rocking forward and rising up on the balls of his feet, trying to meet his growth spurt halfway. He stood beside me on Mereland Road in that unsteady but self-assured posture, rising and falling like a wave. He was socially effective the same way he was good at basketball-through uncowed persistence.
I often heard in later years that people found him intimidating, but for me it was the opposite. Despite my shyness-or because of it-Michael's self-confidence put me at ease. Perhaps because I was conscious of the awkwardness that he overcame, or simply refused to recognize, I fed off his belief in himself.
Besides, being shy is not the same as being modest. The same expectation shaping his life was shaping mine; the belief that your brain is your...
Reviews-
Starred review from February 27, 2023 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. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, William MorrisEndeavor.
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