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Superachiever, Schizophrenic, Killer: Tracing a Friend’s Decline
In “The Best Minds,” Jonathan Rosen pieces together how he and his brilliant classmate diverged after Westchester, Yale and enviable careers.
By Alexandra Jacobs
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THE BEST MINDS: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen
This was one of the Book Review’s 10 best books of 2023 .
“Memoirs have a way of ruining things,” Jonathan Rosen writes in his remarkable new one, “The Best Minds.”
He’s recalling a Berkeley auditorium in the late 1980s, where he was hoping to hear Allen Ginsberg recite his epic poem “Howl,” from which this book takes its title. (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. …”) Years later, Rosen would read that Ginsberg’s longtime lover Peter Orlovsky, who was there accompanying the poetry on finger cymbals, had once tried to attack Ginsberg’s assistant in the crotch with a pair of scissors .
Behind most performances, in other words — most lives — lies some measure of mess and violence, and exposing this can be uncomfortable. But Rosen’s own memoir is the opposite of ruinous. It’s an inch-by-inch, pin-you-to-the-sofa reconstruction of his long friendship with Michael Laudor, who made headlines a decade after the Ginsberg reading: first in The New York Times, as a Yale Law School graduate destigmatizing schizophrenia ; then pretty much everywhere, after stabbing his pregnant girlfriend , Caroline Costello, to death with a kitchen knife, confusing her with a windup doll.
“From Poster Child to Wanted Poster,” Psychiatric Times blared. The New York Post, as only The New York Post can, branded Laudor a “PSYCHO” in typeface more jumbo than the one it had used for the Son of Sam . Now Rosen gives us the exquisitely fine print, drawing from clips, court and police records, legal and medical studies, interviews, diaries and some of Laudor’s own feverish compositions, as he examines the porous line between brilliance and insanity and the complicated policy questions posed by deinstitutionalization.
“I grew up surrounded by people who wrote things down,” he notes with understatement, “and wrote things down myself.”
The two men were raised Jewish and bookish in the suburb of New Rochelle, N.Y., advertised on train platforms as “Forty-five minutes from Broadway.” It was an incubator to a surprising number of cultural big shots, including E.L. Doctorow, Norman Rockwell, Don McLean and Cynthia Ozick, the author’s mother’s best friend.
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A Memoir About Friendship and Mental Illness
A Q&A with Jonathan Rosen, whose new book, The Best Minds , delves into a fraught friendship and the societal response to schizophrenia
When Michael Laudor killed his pregnant girlfriend, Caroline Costello, in 1998, it was the kind of story the tabloids eat up: a fall from great heights. Laudor had appeared previously in the press, but as a success, celebrated for having graduated from Yale Law School despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia. A movie of his life was even in the works, to be directed by Ron Howard and star Brad Pitt. But after the killing, the New York Post ran a picture of Laudor on its cover with the headline Psycho . Some saw him as the victim of a disease; others refused to accept that his disorder had anything to do with the horror he had wrought.
For the writer Jonathan Rosen, the murder was a nightmare come true. Laudor had been his best friend since the two were 10 years old. They had grown up together, and Rosen always felt like he was in the shadow of the book-devouring, fast-talking boy who managed to finish college in three years. Laudor’s illness had confounded Rosen. It seemed to live alongside his brilliance. And society didn’t know what to do with the fact of it: institutionalize him or integrate him.
Rosen’s new memoir, The Best Minds , is his attempt to understand the complexity of his relationship with Laudor, as well as the ways that mental illness has been treated and understood in America over the past half century. Published earlier this week and adapted for an essay in the May issue of The Atlantic , the book delves into a fraught friendship that even at its brightest moments was tinged with competitiveness, and it also offers—nearly a quarter century after Laudor pleaded insanity and was committed to a psychiatric institution—a deep look at the policies and attitudes that have shaped societal responses to schizophrenia.
I have known Rosen for many years, and over the decade it took him to write The Best Minds , he often shared with me that he was struggling to tell the story. I spoke with him recently about his process, and what he hopes the book might accomplish. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Gal Beckerman: You’ve written novels and nonfiction, and you’ve had a long career as an editor. I’m wondering if this story, the story of you and Michael, was always thrumming in the back of your mind as a part of your life you were eventually going to have to contend with through writing.
Jonathan Rosen: It was always, probably, the encounter I was waiting to have, but I didn’t know what it would be an encounter with. So I didn’t actually know what form it would take. And I didn’t know, when I started writing 10 years ago, how large it would become. And what was strange about it is that the more personal and particular I allowed it to be, the more it seemed to overlap with all of these pieces of psychiatry and law that I hadn’t thought about at all when I thought about the story. It doesn’t mean it turned out that my personal life was somehow emblematic, but it does mean that it was more bound up with these larger forces than I ever recognized.
Beckerman: I imagine it was precisely the very personal side of this that felt the scariest to confront.
Rosen: It’s always a little embarrassing when I explain to people that I came to terms with the fact that this was a story about madness and about someone getting killed, but it was the fact that I had to write about my bar mitzvah or my childhood that really terrified me—just reinhabiting who I was and reinhabiting my relationship to Michael, someone I measured myself against, somebody I competed with. I was competitive with him long after; in retrospect, he was still the hare to my tortoise, but had gone off a cliff long before. And I just kept thinking, I’m going to catch him! And so there were so many levels of confusion or shame, discovering what it means to be smart and why I wanted to be smart and what we thought it would mean. At the same time, when I went back, what was amazing to me was how I wasn’t thinking about any of those things when I was friends with him.
Beckerman: Was it hard to sort of scrape away the retrospect of knowing what later happened to Michael? I imagine the temptation to see him only through the lens of his schizophrenia, to ask if there were hints of what would happen to him even as you’re trying to write authentically about being boyhood friends.
Rosen: That’s a perfect framing of the paradox, to be honest. The most wonderful and generous advice I got from my editor was that I should allow myself to write it novelistically. That doesn’t mean make it a novel, but it allowed me to inhabit the 10 year-old boy I was. The quality that mattered most to me was that what happened was not yet . No one could call it a tragic inevitability. It was still a future that was ahead of us. So even if the atmosphere of the book knows what’s to come, there is still an aspect of the book that doesn’t. And in the end, if you’re trying honestly to embody it, you can’t rely on the theory, ideology, history. It’s just, here I am . And there he was.
Read: American madness
Beckerman: This also seems to be a book about how we understand mental illness, how we frame it, how we pathologize it or romanticize it.
Rosen: I had to un-tell a lot of stories because, in a weird way, this was also a story about stories. People were always filling in the missing pieces of Michael’s story, or they allowed him to narrate his own illness. And psychiatry itself had been taken over, after Freud, by stories. It was applied mythology: You talk yourself into wellness. I think it seemed to people like my parents, who were shaped by that world, and to Michael’s mentors, who were shaped by that world, as if there were a kind of a literary triumph in everyone finally living by the rules of literature. But actually, it’s a disaster if science—which is not a story, but something very different—is governed by the rules, let’s say, of fiction.
Beckerman: It does seem like you come to the conclusion that we make a mistake when we approach the mentally ill not as people who are sick, but rather as a narrative problem, as people whose stories we just need to find a way to integrate.
Rosen: The idea that a story bestows wholeness on you is false. I was raised to be a writer and to believe that the world exists to be put into a book, as I think Stéphane Mallarmé said. I couldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t discovered that I no longer believed that. There’s another paradox for you. The world does not exist to be put into a book. Writing does not make you special or better. And you can tell your own story and still be consumed by it.
Beckerman: That paradox only makes me see how high the bar was for you with this book. If the problem is that we’ve given too much power to storytelling, how much harder it must be to sit down and try to write a book. What kind of mechanisms do you have to put in place to both write authoritatively, but also to check yourself that you’re not becoming intoxicated with that power?
Rosen: And with the conventions of the story. Michael was the first person to tell me about Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces . And the enormous appeal of that story is that the hero starts out, the hero gets lost, the hero gets wounded, the hero gets helped by mysterious forces, the hero emerges stronger than before with gifts to bestow on the world. Well, Campbell actually talked about the schizophrenic journey in a lecture collected in a book called Myths to Live By . He described psychosis as a mythic encounter with mystical benefits. So the expectation—and you see it when The New York Times profiled Michael three years before he killed Carrie; people spoke on his behalf about how he had conquered his illness—was the hero’s journey. Not everything is a story that works that way.
Beckerman: You’re now entering yourself into the public accounting of Michael Laudor. And I wonder how you think about the effect you are going to have.
Rosen: It feels very, very strange. But what I would say is that I could never have even thought about writing this story if it hadn’t been an extraordinarily public story—if Michael hadn’t been written about heroically in The New York Times and literally appeared on the cover of the New York Post under the word Psycho . So in a sense, the most lurid thing had already been told. And yet neither of those versions came close to approximating my own experience, and I couldn’t have written the book if I wasn’t telling a personal story. There’s also the case that Carrie’s story wasn’t told at all. One of the epigraphs in the book is from The Washington Post ; it says, “About the victim less was immediately known.” I was determined not to allow Carrie, who I never met, to disappear. I talked to my old friends and Michael’s old friends and I talked to Carrie’s old friends who poured out such moving, vivid recollections. I would never delude myself into believing that this was somehow my reconstituting her. I’m aware that it could only compound the tragedy if you felt her presence more and understand what it really meant. But it seemed important to me that if I was to tell the story, she would also be present.
Beckerman: Do you still visit Michael?
Beckerman: I guess my curiosity would be how he would respond to this book. If he is in a place mentally where he could digest it.
Rosen: Of course. When I visited him, he didn’t acknowledge that he had killed anyone, so I never pretended that he was participating. And I didn’t interview him, for that reason. In other words, he was still inside of a somewhat delusional understanding of what had happened. I imagine that if he is in the place that he needs to be in order to be released, which is to come to terms with both his illness and the fact that he killed someone, this would be the least of it in a way. But I don’t know if that’s true. I simply don’t.
Beckerman: Your book also manages to present just how complex it is to deal with the problem of mental illness and the ways we are stuck in this pendulum swing of intervention and a kind of hands-off approach. Do you feel like your immersion in the subject has given you any kind of policy prescription?
Rosen: I don’t feel all that confident about policy recommendations. And policies in the aftermath of great devastation, when so many systems were destroyed, are even harder. But if I had to say one thing? Don’t lie. Don’t lie to yourself or to other people about outcomes that you have no way of knowing in advance. Don’t think you’re honoring the autonomy of someone who doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t, by defending that person as if you were that person and as if they were making a conscious choice. And don’t tell yourself that it is a conscious choice—if they’re ill and can’t care for themselves—to live on the street. Especially because living on the street may well mean living in prison or dying. So at least tell yourself what it is you are defending.
Beckerman: And that goes also, I imagine, for drawing a clear distinction about what mental illness is and what its consequences can be?
Rosen: To redefine mental illness in such a way that it encompasses half the population, to make it a grand fungible state that half of America suffers from, is not to universalize a helpful impulse, but to betray the very people in whose name these policies were originally undertaken. We live in an age of redefinition such that it doesn’t even have to be intentionally Orwellian. But it does, however, make it very hard to help anyone. If everyone is sick, nobody is. There are people too sick to help themselves or even know they’re sick. And that doesn’t consign those who have those illnesses and function wonderfully and have the support or are receptive to it to a hopeless state. But to pretend it doesn’t afflict some in that way is a lie with fatal consequences. It was devastating to see the ease with which experts felt they could expand their area of authority to turn a program for a small percentage of people into a kind of public-health program where everyone can be treated and helped. Everyone deserves help and treatment. But again, you turn the world into a hospital, then what becomes of actual hospitals? They get closed.
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Briefly Noted
The Best Minds , by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press) . This engrossing memoir centers on the author’s childhood friend Michael Laudor, who developed schizophrenia and, in his thirties, committed a horrific murder. The pair, both Jewish faculty brats with literary dreams, grew up on the same street in New York’s suburbs—parallels that haunt Rosen as Laudor’s brilliance edges into paranoia. Rosen thoughtfully interweaves this story with an account of changing attitudes toward mental illness. Laudor, before his crime, had become a poster boy for a Foucault-influenced intellectual culture that saw psychosis as a metaphor for liberation. Meanwhile, as Rosen notes, institutions for treating the mentally ill were being dismantled with no provision of adequate replacements.
We Should Not Be Friends , by Will Schwalbe (Knopf) . When Schwalbe, an unathletic theatre kid who spent his free time at Yale volunteering for an AIDS hotline, met Maxey, a fellow-senior and a celebrated wrestler intent on becoming a Navy SEAL , he never imagined that they’d be compatible. This delicate memoir tracks their intermittent friendship, from initiation into one of Yale’s secret societies to thirty-five-year college reunion. Gradual revelations from parts of Maxey’s life which Schwalbe missed make for an unexpected page-turner that may inspire readers to reach out to old friends. Schwalbe overcomes the perspectival limitations of memoir-writing by allowing himself access to his friend’s thoughts, notably in rhapsodic contemplations of the sea surrounding the Bahamian island where Maxey ultimately finds purpose.
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Romantic Comedy , by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House) . Flirting with the tropes of its namesake genre, this playful novel follows Sally, a writer on an “S.N.L.”-like show called “Night Owls,” who falls in love with one of its guest hosts. Their relationship develops via e-mail in the post-grocery-wiping, pre-vaccine days of Covid-19 . When Sally decides to visit her beloved in L.A., their time together in his Topanga mansion requires her to navigate incredulity, insecurity, and an offer that she feels is an “affront to my independence.” The novel is preoccupied with the instinctual nature of self-sabotage, and with the fulfillment that can come from defying ingrained impulses.
Künstlers in Paradise , by Cathleen Schine (Henry Holt) . Julian, a directionless young New Yorker, ventures west, to Venice Beach, to help care for his zesty ninety-three-year-old grandmother. When the pandemic descends, he finds himself sequestered indefinitely with her, as she recounts memories of her Anschluss-ruptured Vienna childhood and her family’s subsequent immigration to Hollywood, where she came to know legends including Arthur Schoenberg and Greta Garbo. The novel emphasizes echoes across history but explores intergenerational gaps, too, and—despite handling such weighty subject matter as survivor’s guilt, sexual repression, and the ongoing traumas of racial and religious persecution—maintains a remarkable lightness of tone and of characterization.
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The Best Minds
A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
by Jonathan Rosen
Published by: Penguin Press, April 18, 2023
Genre: Nonfiction | True Crime
Page Count: 576 (Hardcover)
Audiobook Length: 16 hours and 44 minutes
Audiobook Narrator : Jonathan Rosen
ISBN: 9781594206573
Publisher’s Description
One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Book • One of the Wall Street Journal’s 10 Best Books of the Year
“Brave and nuanced…an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.” —The New York Times
“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.” —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 in the hospital when he learned he’d been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, 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. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times 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.
About the Author
Jonathan Rosen, a novelist, essayist, editor, and teacher.
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Book summary and reviews of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen
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The Best Minds
A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
by Jonathan Rosen
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Book summary.
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 in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, 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. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times 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.
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Reader reviews.
"Dazzling ... 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." — Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "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." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "This book gets you in its grip from the first pages. It is the opposite of a magic trick: nothing is hidden but the revelations are constantly stunning, a testament to Jonathan Rosen's sheer skill as an author. The Best Minds is a heartbreaking story and an astonishing work of art, its tragedy rendered with unbounded humanity and depth." —Stephen J. Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio "With bracing honesty, Jonathan Rosen tackles one of medicine's greatest mysteries, the origins and outcomes of maladies of the mind. In artful prose and with a compassionate voice, he takes us on a journey from childhood to academia to locked institutions. Not always easy to read but well worth it, The Best Minds is a work of nuance and insight that triggers thought and pulls at the heart." —Jerome Groopman, MD, Recanati Professor Harvard Medical School; author of How Doctors Think ; coauthor of Your Medical Mind (with Dr. Pamela Hartzband) "In this riveting narrative, Jonathan Rosen guides us through his lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor, a young boy of exceptional promise who becomes a young man exceptionally ill with schizophrenia. This cautionary tale reminds us that schizophrenia is a formidable foe. For even the best minds, the illness can be devastating, subverting its own treatment. And for those who love someone afflicted with schizophrenia, our best instincts for compassion and accommodation can lead to dire consequences. But The Best Minds is not only about genius and madness. It is about how all of us approach what we can't understand and how each of must do better for those who can't fend for themselves." —Thomas Insel, MD, former director, National Institute of Mental Health and author of Healing "A moving evocation of childhood friendship that morphs into a devastating evocation of mental illness. Rosen is persistently judicious and precise. The result is a harrowing tour de force." —Peter D. Kramer, author of Death of the Great Man and Listening to Prozac
Author Information
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.
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Review: The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen
There was a time when Michael Laudor was one of the most prominent mentally ill people in the United States, and by extension, the world. The youngest son of an upper-middle-class family in Westchester county, Laudor was marked as a brilliant mind from childhood, frequently referred to as a genius. He breezed through the curriculum in high school, impressing everyone around him with his eccentric and sharp mind. He finished his undergraduate education at Yale in three years, then got a job with the prestigious (and well-remunerative) financial firm Bain Capital. But in his early 20s, Laudor was beset by hallucinations and paranoia, experiencing sometimes-violent delusions that frightened his devoted parents. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent eight months in a psychiatric facility. Undeterred, he emerged to attend Yale Law School, where he became a favorite of the dean and championed by the faculty. He was profiled in a glowing New York Times piece that represented his resilience as a symbol for the mentally ill everywhere. This inspiring story led to a $600,000 book deal with Scribner, as well as a $2 million Hollywood development deal, one that attracted the interest of luminaries like Ron Howard and Brad Pitt. Laudor was frequently contacted to comment on issues of mental health and became a kind of citizen activist, calling for autonomy and respect for those with mental illness. He was a symbol of success for a whole community of vulnerable people.
Then he hacked his pregnant girlfriend to death with a kitchen knife.
The forthcoming book The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions is author Jonathan Rosen’s account of Laudor’s story, and it’s one he has a valuable perspective on: Rosen and Laudor were best friends in late childhood and adolescence. They shared a neighborhood, the status of bookishness and academic precocity, and parents who embraced academic life and a certain Jewish perspective tinged by the old country and the Holocaust that lay in contrast with the easy integration into American culture of their sons. They were, as is the norm with these relationships, both friends and rivals, each possessed of the vague literary aspirations that are common to smart kids and inclined to drift towards the inevitability of graduate education. The first part of the book is a straightforward exploration of the life of two somewhat-secular Jewish high school students in the Westchester suburbs in the 1970s and 80s. It’s an important portrayal, both because it establishes the unique character of Michael Laudor and sets the (mostly) idyllic backdrop for Laudor’s tragedy.
“The best minds” of the title refers to Laudor, who’s brilliant by wide affirmation and whose intelligence and intensity are now inextricable from his illness, at least in the popular understanding. But it also refers to the people who created the medical and social context in which the murder occurred - the mental health advocates who fought (and fight) against the effort to hospitalize patients who are psychotic or otherwise dangerous, the anti-psychiatry movement that has demonized treatment of debilitating medical conditions, the media that wanted to see Laudor in nothing but facile storybook terms and so of course could see nothing else, the various authority figures and community members who had enabled Laudor’s uninterrupted descent into madness because they thought it was the right thing to do, and the family members and friends who were unable to see how obviously, cripplingly sick he had become near the end. These are the good intentions of Rosen’s subtitle, and though none of those people are to blame for the death of Laudor’s girlfriend, a dedicated and kind woman named Caroline Costello, they collectively created the conditions that made her death inevitable. For a variety of political and cultural reasons - ones I have been trying to document in this space for years - they had arrived at a place where avoiding stigmatizing Michael Laudor was more important than protecting the life of Caroline Costello. The Best Minds is the narrative of a troubled life, but it’s also a quiet and quietly damning indictment of the magical thinking that has ruined contemporary mental healthcare.
Rosen tells Laudor’s story, and his own, in an unhurried fashion, hanging period details liberally and engaging in various forays into the history of mental illness, legal education, and the greater New York metro area. Rosen speaks about his Judaism with a combination of commitment and veiled detachment that I know well from my childhood surrounded by the children of Jewish professors. The Best Minds is in its own way a deeply religious text, though a polyglot and ecumenical one. Its overt interest in religion, albeit more in terms of culture and myth than theology, helps to bring moral questions to the fore. The story of Cain and Abel preoccupies Rosen and serves as a grim symbol for his connection to Laudor, who appears to have been more conventionally observant than Rosen. Throughout, religion serves as a subconscious influence that speaks to lost traditions and the demise of community. What happened to Michael Laudor could have happened to anyone who was brilliant and sick, and yet The Best Minds is a deeply and richly Jewish story.
The book is also an excellent primer on the glories and failings of elite academia, portraying Yale as a kind of magical place where Michael was sheltered and nurtured and where his problems were subject to benevolent, willful neglect. The gothic walls of Yale seem to have created a space of comfort for Laudor, and the many colorful personalities from his law education remind me of the absent-minded professors I grew up around. It’s hard not to wish that Laudor could have stayed at Yale forever, where the standards were high but the pressures low, where he had a sympathetic and progressive community filled with people inclined to make accommodations for his needs. But the story also demonstrates that academia, particularly in the august halls of the Ivy League, is no preparation for real life, and that its smiling permissiveness was for Michael Laudor a kind of abandonment. The academic romance for beautiful madness can be an awful trap, and it’s all bound up with the university’s definition of worth. As Rosen writes, “it was easier to be brilliant than smart, and easier to be smart than competent.”
The powerful, subtly despairing final section of the book pulls apart the threads of pathology that run throughout our “conversation on mental illness,” as I have tried to do in the past. With Michael’s story effectively ended, culminating in his now quarter-century-long commitment to a high-security psychiatric facility, Rosen is free to look at what we’ve made of our responsibility to the mentally ill and lament. His perspective is ruminative and unhurried; the book can’t be said to be polemical. But Rosen has a point of view, and it’s one that’s badly needed in a culture that’s throwing itself deeper and deeper into a pleasant fiction.
The point of this kind of book is to take a particular story, narrativize it effectively, and in doing so make some larger point about our society. The beauty of the Michael Laudor story, so deeply unbeautiful, is that the argument makes itself. Laudor was a symbol of what people with severe mental illnesses could be and do, when he was being celebrated in the pages of the New York Times , and in killing Caroline Costello he was also a symbol of what people with severe mental illnesses can be and do. There is none of one without the other. Rosen shows an expert hand in synthesizing these realities - the great heights the mentally ill can climb to, and also the rare but very real acts of unspeakable violence they can commit. The problem isn’t that his argument isn’t compelling. The problem is that it’s an argument that the tastemakers in our culture simply don’t want to hear.
Consider deinstitutionalization. Few things could be less popular or esteemed in the public imagination than long-term mental healthcare facilities. People with no personal experience with mental illness themselves often have a visceral reaction to the very idea of institutions, assuming them to universally be houses of horror. And so deinstitutionalization, in a crude sense, is quite popular. It’s impossible to say if deinstitutionalization contributed to this story’s tragedy; after all, Laudor was committed to an institution for eight months and was released when his doctors felt he was suitably prepared to return to the world. But still, deinstitutionalization haunts the book as it does American mental health care, sixty years since John F. Kennedy signed the bill that forced so many long-term care facilities to close and which ushered in a new system of community mental healthcare - a system that we never bothered to build, forcing thousands of severely ill patients out of the institutions and into the jails or onto the streets. It’s the reality that underlies everything else that happens in this space, and a record of deadly optimism and witless good intentions, which still plague us. Rosen captures this brilliantly.
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.
Rosen references testimony from the late 1980s, when the National Institutes of Mental Health was queried by Congress as to where those released during deinstitutionalization had gone. They could not account for almost 60% of those patients. Which should not be surprising: then, as today, the pressure is not to throw away the key but to “street” patients as quickly as possible. The biggest problem in American mental healthcare is not people getting stuck in the system but those who need to get in and can’t. ( Ask Bailey Hamor’s parents .) Spots in halfway houses and supportive housing can be brutally hard to secure; stays in those places are always temporary and rarely free. Peppered throughout the remarkably well-researched volume are real-life stories of suffering people caught in the undertow of good intentions. Like Joyce Brown, a violently schizophrenic homeless woman who displayed all sorts of nakedly unhealthy behaviors. She was freed from long-term care thanks to the dogged efforts of the ACLU, which opposed her continued treatment - in defiance of the strenuous and repeated objections of her sisters, who had struggled to care for her for years and who knew her to be too deeply sick to be set free. But set free she was, set free onto the streets to experience homelessness, heroin addiction, and early death. Again, the central question of deinstitutionalization rings out: what did you think was going to happen?
As Rosen unsparingly documents, the efforts to “destigmatize” mental illness have created a perverse scenario in which mental health advocates - who will tell you that their goal is to make mental illness more visible - push the darkest parts of mental illness deeper and deeper into the closet. You see, the fact that mental illness indisputably increases the odds of committing certain acts of violence could be said to stigmatize the mentally ill, so it must not be mentioned; that some mentally ill people commit sexual offenses could be said to stigmatize the mentally ill, so that must not be mentioned; that some people with mental illness commit hideously brutal acts of self-injury could be said to stigmatize the mentally ill, so it must not be mentioned; that some people with mental illness play with and eat their own excrement could be said to stigmatize the mentally ill, so it must not be mentioned. I beg you to understand what’s happening here: the further we go with the normalization and destigmatization of mental illness, the more the most severely mentally ill must be avoided, marginalized, dismissed, disappeared, explained away. An effort that ostensibly exists to help the mentally ill has washed its hands of the most debilitated. Every day that people with Ivy League degrees, laptop jobs, and ADHD nominate themselves as the face of mental illness, while others dismiss the prevalence of very ugly behaviors that very much do occur, is a day that the violent homeless schizophrenic person who needs our sympathy the most loses more and more of it. It’s a despicable reality.
Rosen points out that newspapers tended to say that people like Laudor had “a history of schizophrenia,” rather than that he was schizophrenic, as if embarrassed to acknowledge that for some people this was a lasting and defining affliction. As Rosen writes, “What did it say about stigma if you had to denature something before you acknowledged it?”
Even Rosen repeats the well-worn trope that the mentally ill are more likely to be the victims of crime than to commit it. As I will go on pointing out, this is true but entirely trivial: because a small percentage of offenders commit a large majority of violent crimes, almost any identifiable group will be more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. This tells us literally nothing about the underlying prevalence of violent crime among that group or how that prevalence compares to the population writ large. And as the link to the National Institutes of Health above shows, some populations of mentally ill patients - those with psychotic disorders, those with paranoid ideation, those who resist treatment - sometimes do very bad things. Rosen’s book is admirable in its unflinching portrayal of those things. Like, say, the man in an institution who strangled his roommate to death with a pair of tied-together socks and then proceeded to break every one of his roommate’s fingers before they were found.
Awhile back, I pointed out an essay in which the author went to great lengths to deny that any of Kanye West’s instability, any unfortunate behavior at all, could ever be related to his mental illness. Later, she said this.
This is, I think, the inevitable, rotten conclusion of social justice norms about mental health. You see, if mental illness is normalized as it should be, then mentally ill people are normal , and if mentally ill people are normal, then behavior that is abnormal cannot be caused by mental illness. QED.
The district attorney in charge of the prosecution of Michael Laudor was vociferously opposed to his evading prosecution or imprisonment in a correctional facility due to his schizophrenia. The prosecution wanted him to go to regular jail, and fought to achieve that outcome for months. The question that should immediately demand our attention is, what’s the difference between that district attorney’s perspective and that of Jody Serrano? The former is the product of a conservative, tough-on-crime, no excuses attitude towards mental illness; the latter is the expression of a witless, condescending, self-righteous, social media-derived definition of “mental illness” as a series of adorable personality quirks, found in otherwise totally unobjectionable and high-achieving professionals. But the ultimate moral and legal place where they land must be the same: Michael Laudor should not have avoided a conventional criminal trial and ordinary state prison thanks to his mental illness. After all, we must not dismiss someone’s poor behavior as the result of mental health conditions. I’ve used the example of James Holmes before, and I will again: a single juror spared James Holmes from execution for his crimes because that juror recognized that he had been in the grips of crippling schizophrenia. Well, here’s Jody Serrano to tell you that James Holmes should have been put to death. Otherwise, we facilitate stigma. 💜
This book felt like a glass of cold water because I’ve pushed against this awful movement for a long time and see no reason to believe it’s going to get any better. I look and look for some grappling with the messy, sad, sometimes tragic reality of mental illness in major media and I find nothing. I’ve tried to pitch stories to prominent places myself; they don’t even email back to say no. Meanwhile a new doctrine of “destigmatization” gains power every day on TikTok, Twitter, and Tumblr, driven by people whose mental illnesses seem never to have seriously inconvenienced them in any way. So you can imagine how (if you’ll forgive me) therapeutic it felt to read Rosen say things like “when Jeanine Pirro told a newspaper that ‘it would be an insult to every mentally ill person in this country to say that because someone is mentally ill they are more prone to violence,’ I did not feel she was championing the rights of people with mental illness.”
The book is not perfect. My galley copy exceeds 500 pages, and the pace is sometimes off, particularly in the early going. I think something like 25 or 50 pages could be trimmed without losing any of the book’s remarkable accumulative force and in so doing adding a little more momentum. In particular, I think the book’s opening depiction of the shared childhood and adolescence of Rosen and Laudor could stand a little pruning. I get it; the book is not a manifesto, and it has to build its argument with the steady accumulation of sad details that lead to the tragedy of Caroline Costello’s death. Establishing exactly who Michael Laudor is and was, obviously, is key to that effort. But that portion of the book is a little slow, and there are moments elsewhere in the book where I would also cut a page or three.
I half suspect that Rosen spends so much time talking about the early days of his friendship with Laudor in part to burnish his credentials as someone uniquely well-suited to tell the story. This is relevant because, as Rosen admits, he and Laudor had drifted apart even before Laudor’s schizophrenia diagnosis. What’s consistently unclear to me is just how far apart. When Rosen described his own wedding as an intimate affair, I understood why Laudor had not attended. But when we later learn that Rosen had not gone to Laudor’s father’s funeral, I was genuinely surprised. The two boys, and the two families, had been so close. I understand that there was a little bad blood with Laudor’s father over a controversy regarding the high school newspaper, but, well… it’s the high school newspaper. The high school newspaper shouldn’t permanently estrange people. It suggests that the rift was wider than the book wants to admit, given that its marketing heavily stresses Rosen’s relationship with Laudor. Which is unnecessary; Rosen clearly does have a unique and valuable perspective, and anyway the book’s great feat is not a triumph of memory but of research.
At times, a part of me wanted Rosen to be a little more explicit, to more directly and unambiguously look into the camera and tell us how he felt. I wanted him to say “this is what a healthy, fair mental health discourse would look like.” But I understand that The Best Minds isn’t that book. Instead, it’s a brilliantly realized American tragedy, one that argues obliquely and emotionally rather than in speeches. When it does come right out and say it, the result is stirring and sobering. Near the end of the book, Rosen writes “Violence and mental illness have been legally entangled ever since dangerousness, rather than illness, became the necessary prerequisite for hospitalization.” And this really is the heart of it: in an effort to ensure the autonomy and rights of those with mental illness, we created a system where you have to be violent to be taken seriously, and where absent violence the people who love you most and know you best have no recourse for forcing you into treatment when you desperately need it. If ever there’s been a tragedy of good intentions, there it is. The Best Minds is a chronicle of that tragedy. I think it’s the best book about mental illness I’ve ever read.
| Because these advocates are generally well-educated they have a modicum of self-awareness of their control issues. It bothers them but not to the level of motivating them to seek self-improvement. Instead they wrap themselves in what ever victim identity shroud of protection they can find. They become vulnerable narcissists armed to the teeth with both defensive and passive-aggressive vocabulary designed to prevent any criticism of their behavior. But they have an emotional empathy connection with the mentally ill because of this lack of control. They project a scenario that basically says "if they can involuntarily commit mentally ill people, they can do the same with me because I too lack control of my critical thinking apparatus at times." Most of them KNOW they are doing harm to the mentally ill by refusing to accept their need for forced treatment... but they promote it for their own selfish reasons to prevent the system from blurring the lines and capturing them too. And historically we do have some evidence that, for example, the "hysterical female" would be sent to the asylum. I think a solution is for those that want to see better treatment services for the mentally ill, to work on specific definitions and an iron process for diagnosis that supports involuntary commitment. Personally I would like to see some more services to help those that need cognitive behavior therapy, but the line between irrational behavior and mental illness should be defined.
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His Michael: Review of ‘The Best Minds’ by Jonathan Rosen
By Sally Satel
June 20, 2023
The Best Minds opens on a green lawn in a Westchester suburb in 1973. It’s here that the book’s author, Jonathan Rosen, meets his new best friend, Michael Laudor. They are 10 years old. Rosen’s memoir ends 50 years later with Michael confined to a hospital for the criminally insane. The interim years, so full of promise and crisis, are rendered with deep humility, wisdom, and erudition in a book that is nothing less than an American masterpiece.
Raised by Jewish intellectual parents, the boys loved books and music as well as board games, politics, and pickup basketball—but their crowning compatibility was “the belief that your brain is your rocket ship and that simply as a matter of course you are going to climb inside and blast off,” Rosen says. “We would outsoar the shadow of ordinary existence and think our way into stratospheric success.”
With his photographic memory and personal charm, Michael dazzled anyone who met him, including Rosen, who regarded his mind as a subset of Michael’s. “I’d always been the tortoise to Michael’s hare,” Rosen writes. Competition would flare between them, but the cerebral rocket ship had room for both, and they blasted off to Yale College. There, the friendship cooled, owing to different majors, different friends, and Michael’s stinging view, expressed openly, that his friend wouldn’t be able to keep up with him. But their bond endured: “We carried the world of each other’s childhood in our pockets like a kryptonite pebble, a fragment of the home planet.”
After Yale, Rosen headed to Berkeley for a Ph.D. in English. Michael, the hare, graduated a year early summa cum laude (“summa cum Laudor,” Rosen quips) and took a consulting job at Bain and Company. The plan was to make a lot of money over the next decade and then turn to a life of writing.
But the pressure of Bain’s 100-hour work week combined with familial fate—psychotic illness ran in his father’s line—caused Michael to crack. Bosses were tapping his phone, he thought, and colleagues were spying on him. Once, he watched his secretary morph into a creature with claws and bloody fangs.
Within a year, Michael, then 24, was back home in New Rochelle where his psychosis blossomed further. Convinced that his mother and father had been replaced by surgically altered Nazis who had killed his real parents and now wanted to kill him, he slept with a baseball bat and carried a knife around the house.
The Best Minds is haunted by Nazis. They terrorized Rosen’s father, a professor of German literature who spoke with a soft Viennese accent—the country from which he was rescued as a teen and before he came by himself to America. Rosen and his older sister, Anna, are named for his father’s parents, murdered in the Holocaust. Nazis followed Michael into the locked psychiatric ward at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center where he battled fears that Mengele himself was planning to remove part of his brain without anesthesia.
After eight months as an inpatient, the medications for his newly diagnosed schizophrenia worked well enough for Michael to be discharged to a halfway house. But instead of adopting the role of infantilized mental patient that social workers seemed to envision for him, he enrolled in Yale Law School.
Before his hospitalization, Michael had applied successfully to the top law schools. He chose Yale and was forthright about his mental illness with the dean, who welcomed him warmly, comparing his psychosis to an “invisible wheelchair” and promising to provide the “ramps.”
Despite delusions of monkeys eating his brain, Michael did well enough in class. Professors accommodated him when he could not do the work, and fellow students read to him when his eyes blurred from medication side effects. He began dating Carrie Costello, a shy, petite computer whiz interested in education reform. Michael graduated on time but could not find a job, so the faculty created a special postgraduate fellowship for him.
“I went to the most supportive mental health care facility that exists in America: the Yale Law School,” Michael would tell a New York Times reporter who wrote a profile of him three years later. In the Times article, Michael, then 32, described his advocacy for people with serious mental illness. “People with schizophrenia are negated constantly,” he said, “and I can be a role model.”
Titled “A Voyage to Bedlam and Part Way Back,” the Times article sparked interest from publishers. Michael’s subsequent 80-page proposal for a memoirincited a bidding war, culminating in a $600,000 contract. Soon, director Ron Howard was offering $1.5 million for the film rights with actor Brad Pitt signed to play Michael.
Michael was held aloft by the media and Hollywood as a symbol of how people with schizophrenia can succeed. But he would soon demonstrate that genius is no bulwark against unmedicated madness. Engaged to Carrie, Michael was alone in their apartment all day. As he struggled with writer’s block and fended off his nervous publisher and the Hollywood writers, his medications appeared to lose their effectiveness. Eventually, he stopped taking them. No one could compel him to resume them, especially as his delusions intensified. When Carrie, then pregnant, tried to talk him into going back on his medications, she began to look like the enemy.
On the morning of June 17, 1998, Carrie alerted her colleagues that she would be late to due to a personal emergency. That evening, police found her body on the kitchen floor, stabbed multiple times. Michael had already fled to Cornell, where he’d once been a student in a summer program, and flagged down a campus security officer. Still covered in blood, he told her he might have killed his girlfriend or maybe it was a space alien or a mechanical look-alike doll that was planning to kill him. In the next day’s New York Post , the headline was “Psycho.”
The “best minds” in Rosen’s book belong not only to the author and Michael. They include the 1960s poets, postmodernists, public-health experts, legal theorists, and judges who put their utopian visions ahead of the vulnerable to create a system of laws and mental-health institutions whose failures continue to reverberate.
The Beats saw the mentally ill as misunderstood geniuses straining against societal norms. One of them, Allen Ginsberg, gave Rosen’s book its name.“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” reads the first line of his 1956 poem, Howl .Michel Foucault, whose Madness and Civilization Rosen read at Berkeley, fashioned schizophrenia as a social construct. It was a designation, not a diagnosis—a way to punish one’s ideological enemies. Asylums, it followed, were meant to keep the bad ideas contained, as well as the people who held them. But when the author visited Michael during his hospitalization at Columbia, he writes, “I found it impossible to pretend that he was suffering from a ‘social construct.’”
Policies were also misguided. President Kennedy signed a bill in 1963 designed to build a system of community-based care in place of mental hospitals. Intentions were good, but outcomes were bad. The sickest could not thrive in the community; they needed structure and a social network. Not only were there few hospital beds in case of a crisis, but the new clinics were set up to treat neurotics and the socially deprived, not those needing medication and heavy doses of benign paternalism.
At the level of federally funded research, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health at the time was a psychoanalyst who viewed all social problems as his agency’s legitimate province, so severe conditions took a distant back seat. The safety net was in tatters, too. Medicaid requirements “did not create a caring community or even an indifferent one,” Rosen observes. “Checks and pills are what remain of a grand promise, the ingredients of a mental health care system that had never been baked but were handed out like flour and yeast in separate packets to starving people.”
In the legal domain, the civil-liberties bar and state laws made it nearly impossible to intervene when a person stopped taking medication and became delusional and unstable. Families’ hands are still tied today; they can only watch their loved ones unravel, unable to get help until danger is imminent. In most states, a person must be about to kill himself or someone else before involuntary treatment can take place.
Meanwhile, efforts to destigmatize mental illness were, and still are, largely based on a misbegotten 1998 MacArthur Foundation report that was issued just weeks before Michael killed Carrie. Its press headline: “Mentally Ill, Not Especially Violent.”In truth, people with schizophrenia who are not taking medication are four to seven times more likely to commit violent crimes, such as assault and homicide.
In Michael’s case, another blow was dealt by the family friends and professors who were blinded by the glare of his genius. “Brilliance was so highly prized in our world that it seemed to guarantee all the other brain functions,” Rosen writes. Michael’s professors and supporters reflexively underplayed his vulnerability and rejected the idea that hospital containment served a vital purpose, and they thereby lost perspective on the depth of his problem.
The Best Minds makes us ask how we let these things happen—things ranging from Michael’s escalating madness to the proliferation of psychotic souls in urban encampments, roaming the streets with their “right” to liberty intact. Of course, the freedom to be crazy is no freedom at all, as many of these people—once treated—will usually attest.
Rosen shows the power of ideology and romanticization to distort the truth about both mental illness and genius. Absent a realistic and pragmatic vision, society is unlikely to agree on what we owe to people with disabling mental illness. At the personal level, the author grapples with what he owes a friend who remains so deeply estranged from reality. Michael remains confined to the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center, a maximum-security hospital for those judged not guilty by reason of insanity. Michael is too ill to be released.
In the quarter century since Michael’s terrible act, not a lot has changed for the most vulnerable. We can neither predict nor prevent severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar illness. The treatment and social-welfare systems are still full of gaps. Jail cells in many cities still hold more severely mentally ill people than do hospitals, and the threshold for involuntary care is still too high.
The Best Minds is one of the best books about mental illness I have ever read. Its grand sweep takes in the nuanced cultural history of ideas and policies regarding people with severe illness. Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon did this for depression, and Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety for anxiety. Those books, both superb, are grounded in memoir as well, but the specific horror of Rosen’s makes it especially unforgettable.
Reflecting upon a rare, painful visit to his still-institutionalized friend, Rosen pronounces schizophrenia to be “the most human of disorders, a reminder of how remarkable our minds are. It’s like the Tin Man realizing he has a heart because it’s breaking.”
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THE BEST MINDS: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen. This was one of the Book Review's 10 best books of 2023. "Memoirs have a way of ruining ...
I have copied the book blurb for 'The Best Minds': "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
THE BEST MINDS. by Jonathan Rosen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2023. An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae. 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 ...
A Q&A with Jonathan Rosen, whose new book, The Best Minds, delves into a fraught friendship and the societal response to schizophrenia. By Gal Beckerman. The book offers a deep look at the ...
Review by Lori Gottlieb. April 20, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT. From the beginning of Jonathan Rosen's haunting "story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions," we know how it ...
Buy Book. Robert, a professor of German literature, and his wife, Norma, a novelist, chose New Rochelle to ensure that Jonathan and his 12-year-old sister would obtain a better education than ...
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 ...
The Best Minds A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions. Author: Jonathan Rosen. ISBN-13: 978-0241647448. Publisher: Allen Lane. Guideline Price: £30. Jonathan Rosen's ...
About The Best Minds. 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 Best Minds is Rosen's masterful attempt to reconcile what happened to Michael, Carrie and their families and friends, and how — or if — their story might have gone another direction. More than half a century later, Rosen looks squarely at his friendship and the ways in which a culture that reveres intellectual achievement can blind itself to the limitations of that same person's ...
The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press).This engrossing memoir centers on the author's childhood friend Michael Laudor, who developed schizophrenia and, in his thirties, committed a ...
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen book review. Click to read the full review of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions in New York Journal of Books. Review written by Elaine Margolin.
Reviews; The Best Minds. A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions ... ISBN: 9781594206573. Amazon. Publisher's Description. One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Book • One of the Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of the Year ... The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's ...
Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds tells his tragic story. This is the story of the author's lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor: his neighbour growing up in 1970s Westchester County; his ...
The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times almost unbearably sad, The Best Minds is an extreme version ...
Review: The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen. Freddie deBoer. Mar 13, 2023. 300. There was a time when Michael Laudor was one of the most prominent mentally ill people in the United States, and by extension, the world. The youngest son of an upper-middle-class family in Westchester county, Laudor was marked as a brilliant mind from childhood ...
The TLS - The tragic tale of a high achiever brought low by schizophrenia and the spirit of the age. A book review of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen is a memoir of a boyhood friendship, a passionate critique of the failure of American mental health policy and a ...
June 20, 2023. The Best Minds opens on a green lawn in a Westchester suburb in 1973. It's here that the book's author, Jonathan Rosen, meets his new best friend, Michael Laudor. They are 10 ...
I think it's the best book about mental > illness I've ever read. I haven't read the book, so take this with a grain of salt, please. I can't speak to the specific case of Michael Laudor. However, the parent comment is about "Violence and mental illness have been legally entangled" which is pretty general.
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 ...
Book review: The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. From Nine To Noon, 10:35 am on 24 April 2024. Share this.
Jonathan Rosen is the author of two novels: Eve's Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning, and two other works of non-fiction: 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.
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 ...
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Fiction books make up eight of the top 10 new bestsellers so far this year and contributed to a 3.6% rise in adult fiction sales in the first quarter of 2024, Publishers Weekly reported, while ...