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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-
November 1, 2022
Rosen tells the story of his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, who graduated summa cum laude from college, then suffered a psychotic break that landed him in a psychiatric hospital with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. As reported in the New York Times and a memoir whose film rights were acquired by Ron Howard, Michael overcame adversity and graduated from Yale Law School. Then, as his illness resurfaced, he stabbed his devoted girlfriend Carrie Costello to death. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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.
April 15, 2023 This true story is not a happily-ever-after tale about someone conquering mental illness. Instead, Rosen shares the tragic life of his close childhood friend, Michael Laudor. The brilliant boy grew up to be a 6-foot-3 genius who graduated summa cum laude from Yale. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Still, he attended Yale law school, then landed a $2.1 million book-and-movie deal about his life and moved to New Rochelle with his sweet, petite girlfriend, Carrie, who accepted it when he told her about his mental illness. According to Michael, Carrie's parents weren't happy that their daughter was in love with a Jewish man with schizophrenia. It turned out they were right to worry. Michael stopped taking his medication, suffered from more severe delusions, and ultimately thought Carrie, by then his fianc�e, was a robot or doll who had been sent to torture and kill him and fatally stabbed her. In this well-written, affecting account, Rosen notes that a Yale forensic psychologist said Michael showed how "we get lulled by successful people" and fail to understand the severity of mental illness.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from March 1, 2023 An account of a brilliant young man brought down by schizophrenia, with lives shattered all around him. The subject of Rosen's book, Michael Laudor, had a capacious and wide-ranging mind, taking in higher learning and popular culture alike. "Michael and I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting," writes the author. In fact, Rockwell lived in and set paintings in their town, a suburban idyll. Laudor and Rosen excelled while living out a late baby boomer existence in academic homes among Holocaust survivors, yet with ominous shadows on the horizon. As Rosen writes, "the culture had prepared us for David Berkowitz," the poster child for mental illness presented as satanic evil. Laudor was somewhat late in manifesting the schizophrenic break that would require his institutionalization, though, reflecting on events, Rosen sees warning signs such as "a mysterious habit of spending whole days in his room with the lights out." Having worked in law and business while budding writer Rosen studied English literature, Laudor decided that he, too, wanted to be an author, leading to encounters with the publishing and film industries that may well have accelerated his final psychotic break, one that culminated in homicide. Rosen captures many worlds in this attentive, nuanced narrative, evoking boyhood discovery, the life of post-Shoah Jews in America, the rise of predatory capitalism, and the essential inability of one friend to comprehend fully the "delicate brain" of the other. It's an undeniably tragic story, but Rosen also probes meaningfully into the nature of mental illness. Throughout, he is keenly sensitive, as when he writes of the perils of self-awareness, "The flip side of the idea that writing heals you, perhaps, was the fear that failing to tell your story, and fulfill your dreams, cast you into outer darkness." An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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