The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
(Penguin Press, $32)
We know from the start of The Best Minds that its story of a friendship and a struggle with schizophrenia will end in tragedy, said Lori Gottlieb in The Washington Post. But author Jonathan Rosen “tells this story with such a keen mix of compassion and eloquence we can’t help but hope there will be a twist that somehow saves everyone.” Rosen was 10 when he met Michael Laudor, and the two suburban New York boys quickly became best friends, both of them basketball-playing book lovers who eventually attended Yale together. But shortly after his 1984 graduation, Laudor began experiencing paranoid delusions, and his promising career in business consulting was paused for an eight-month stay at a neuropsychiatric clinic.
Following a subsequent stint in a group home, Laudor tried to get back on track, said Richard J. McNally in The Wall Street Journal. He entered Yale Law School and, with faculty and other students supporting him as he contended with symptoms of schizophrenia, he eventually earned his degree. His candor about his condition led to a 1995 New York Times profile that celebrated his bravery and brilliance. Laudor soon had deals worth $2.1 million for a planned memoir and a movie adaptation that would star Leo DiCaprio. But Laudor struggled to write, stopped taking medication, and descended into deeper psychosis. In 1998, he fatally stabbed his pregnant fiancée, believing she had been replaced by a look-alike or an alien. He remains confined in a maximum-security hospital today.
“To say that this is a memoir, a case study, or a book about schizophrenia is to dramatically undersell it,” said David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. “This is a magisterial work, as much a sociological study of late-20th-century America as it is a book about madness.” Rosen wants us to see how the tragedy was in part the outcome of choices the country had made about mental illness and its treatment. Not that Rosen would ever suggest there was obviously a better way. “Almost every harm in this story is the result of good intentions, and there are no easy answers.”