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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, 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, ;;;;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 < ;;;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,
