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The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
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 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.
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 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.
575 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 18, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,141 reviews
August 29, 2023
3.5 stars — I finally finished the magnum opus on mental illness, “The Best Minds” by Jonathan Rosen. This book is very difficult to review because the underlying true story which the book is based is compelling and very readable. But, too often the author goes away from that into detailed explanations of mental illness topics that were much less interesting. The author begins the story by sharing details of his boyhood friendship with Michael Laudor. Both boys could best be described as geniuses and their competitiveness as well as their friendship are beautifully described in the first 100 pages or so of this very long book. After both boys decide to attend Yale University, they drift apart and the book was not nearly relatable to me as the author only gives us the bits and pieces of Michael he observed as well as what he picked up from Michael’s friends and professors. After graduating, Michael becomes very successful very quickly before suffering a mental break and is diagnosed with severe schizophrenia. The book digresses into research on relevant mental health topics as well as legalities involving the rights of the severely mentally ill. In my opinion the less the book covered Michael’s life the less I liked it. The book was too wordy (even if it was very well researched) and I felt like I was reading a textbook for long periods of time. When the book drifts back to Michael and his rise to celebrity status after a New York Times’ article about the battles he fought and the obstacles he overcame was published, the book really picked up steam. I was fully invested again by the time the book covered Michael’s descent into madness and the tragedies that result from this. The author does an amazing job delving into the innermost details of Michael’s existence by interviewing every available person that played a role in his life. I truly learned a lot and felt like the author did an outstanding job in covering Michael’s life and what led to his mental decline and tragic outcome. The only criticism I have of the book is the way too detailed analysis of mental illness, the legal system and all the tangents the author takes the reader on when he should have stuck to the very compelling main story line.
March 13, 2023
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. And I think it's the best book about mental illness I've ever read.
Read the rest of my review here.
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. And I think it's the best book about mental illness I've ever read.
Read the rest of my review here.
November 19, 2023
Sometimes I look at my old reviews and realize I repeat myself. Even worse, I sometimes mention things as marks of literary quality in one book, and then cite the same things in other reviews as evidence that the writer should be consigned to the 3rd circle of hell. The good news is that I am going to start this review by saying something I am certain I have never said before.
The notes on sources and acknowledgments section of this book alone should make it a sure winner for the National Book Award. Hell, it should win every award. I am astonished at this book's intellectual and reportorial rigor, even more so by its complexity, its acceptance that there are things that cannot be explained, and most of all for the grace, compassion, and love Rosen shows to most everyone in any way connected to this story (he even holds back when talking about Jeanine Pirro, and she absolutely does not deserve to benefit from his restraint and decency.)
Briefly, Rosen (who is a magnificent writer in addition to being a mensch and a meticulous reporter, if that was not clear from the praise above) was best friends with Michael Laudor from the ages of 10-18. When both went to Yale, Michael cut ties with Rosen because he felt Rosen was holding him back. While they certainly intersected some at Yale, they were not close. Rosen recreates Michael's undergrad years from the stories of others.
That Laudor was a genius appears indisputable. He was considered so by many people in positions to know and, as objective evidence, he graduated from Yale summa cum laude with a double major in just 3 years despite often missing classes and rarely sleeping. He was also nearly universally thought to be charming and attractive when younger. Michael was also really quite strange and I think the investment so many put into him despite the difficult aspects of his personality serves as some evidence of his charm.
After Yale, Michael went on to work at Bain Consulting (which to be fair is sort of an evil empire) and it was there he shifted from odd but charming to delusional and paranoid. He believed there were demons working at Bain (again, not impossible) and that the company had bugged his phone and office. He quit that job, ostensibly to write, and believed Bain was actively tracking him and plotting to snatch him back. I don't want to get into the story, read the book for that, but the network that formed around Michael is extraordinary. Eventually, Michael had a full-on psychotic break and he ended up inpatient for 9 months. There he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. Before the breakdown Michael had applied to and been accepted by Yale Law School and by-the-by, he decides to attend (again, there is a lot of story in the book.) The great Guido Calabrese was the legendary dean of Yale Law at the time (he later became a legendary judge) and he personally took Michael under his wing telling him that if he had a wheelchair they would make accommodations for him, and at Yale Law they would accommodate his schizophrenia. Again, there is a lot of story here, read the book. I will just say that Michael graduated, but was unemployable. He decided to write a book about his experiences at the suggestion of a well-known book agent who I believe had been a college classmate. Though he never completed the book, he wrote a treatment that was optioned by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and first Leo DiCaprio and then Brad Pitt were attached to play him. He became quite famous. He was featured in a widely read NYT article, looked to as a spokesperson for the mentally ill and even had a profile in People. Then he stabbed to death his long-time girlfriend, who was pregnant because he thought she was a wind-up doll trying to destroy him.
Michael Laudor remains in a facility for the criminally insane to this day. All that I have said is public record, and lots is on the jacket flap. The why and how is the question here, and Rosen casts a wide net (but not too wide). He speaks with so many people who knew Michael, with experts in the field, with Ellyn Saks, a schizophrenic law professor whose book "The Center Cannot Hold" has been on my TBR for years, and now I really need to get to it. He talks to religious leaders and law professors and Michael's friends and protectors. He plumbs his own memories of growing up in 1970's New Rochelle in a secular Jewish home with a professor father (Michael's father was also a professor) and a writer mother. Rosen is looking for answers, and he finds some but also makes clear that some things will never be answered. There is so much tragedy here. Caroline Costello's terrifying violent murder is, of course, the greatest tragedy. Rosen never forgets that in the book. She was a kind and brilliant woman herself who worked long hours for years on a project to improve public education and supported Michael even when that became difficult, and eventually deadly. Michael himself is a close second in magnitude of tragedy. He had no power to not do what he did. Years later it is not clear that even now he understands that he killed the person he most loved in the world. This was a brilliant ambitious man, with a good heart tortured by this terrible disease and its unremitting symptoms. There are other tragic figures here too. Michael's gruff demanding father who used all of his energy and volume to keep Michael moving forward and his mother who advocated for him tirelessly, only to see her work end with the death of a woman she loved and considered family at the hands of her very ill son. Tragic too are the professors, especially Dean Calabrese, who did everything possible (truly amazing things) to help a disabled student, to strive toward equity, only to have this ending be visited on them. There are mental health professionals, law enforcement officers, and friends who gave so much and who are haunted by this ending (in the case of some of them were also physically harmed by Michael.)
Rosen looks at 100 years of evolving public policy, law, psychiatry, and popular thought regarding mental health from the 1927 Buck decision (wherein the Supreme Court ruled the state could sterilize people with intellectual and mental disabilities without their consent because, as Justice Douglass said "three generations of imbeciles are enough") to the present. He also looks at family dynamics and cultural norms that play into illness. He looks at all of this with a compassionate yet unbiased eye. He has no agenda other than gaining some understanding and promoting greater knowledge and more thoughtful, reasoned empathic policy and treatment for the ill. Rosen says in his notes section at the end that one book he looked to modeled empathic investigation and the need to accept paradox. Maybe those things were modeled in that book, but I can attest that those things are displayed on every page of The Best Minds. This should be part of the liturgy for dealing with mental illness. We are in a moment where the mentally ill are vilified and their lives wholly devalued. Last week here in New York a mentally ill man was killed when placed in a chokehold after acting erratically on the F train. I was not there, it sounds scary and I assume that the man who killed him felt the delusional man represented a threat to him and others. In the city people have chosen up sides, with people who were not there deciding that the guy executing the chokehold should get the electric chair, and others who were also not there thinking this ex-Marine who killed a sick man to be a hero. Both are the wrong ways to look at this. There is plenty of tragedy to go around here. Let's just figure it out and maybe we can do better by everyone next time. Maybe we can get the sick man the help he needs and maybe we can try teaching people that one can often defuse a situation without physical violence. (The video does not show such efforts, though certainly they might have been tried and failed.)
I am going to shut up because this is really long already, but I have been imploring everyone I know to read this. Yesterday I implored my sister and my brother. Today my co-workers (I did not go to Yale law, but every faculty member I work with actually did, and I think they will find it particularly compelling -- Yale plays a huge role in this story.) I have recommended it to my BFF and to a couple of people here on GR. And now I beg you, whoever might be reading this, to read the book. And if you know anyone on the nominating committee for the National Book Award, or the Pulitzer Committee, or hell any book award nominating arm tell them I said they need to read this. Now.
The notes on sources and acknowledgments section of this book alone should make it a sure winner for the National Book Award. Hell, it should win every award. I am astonished at this book's intellectual and reportorial rigor, even more so by its complexity, its acceptance that there are things that cannot be explained, and most of all for the grace, compassion, and love Rosen shows to most everyone in any way connected to this story (he even holds back when talking about Jeanine Pirro, and she absolutely does not deserve to benefit from his restraint and decency.)
Briefly, Rosen (who is a magnificent writer in addition to being a mensch and a meticulous reporter, if that was not clear from the praise above) was best friends with Michael Laudor from the ages of 10-18. When both went to Yale, Michael cut ties with Rosen because he felt Rosen was holding him back. While they certainly intersected some at Yale, they were not close. Rosen recreates Michael's undergrad years from the stories of others.
That Laudor was a genius appears indisputable. He was considered so by many people in positions to know and, as objective evidence, he graduated from Yale summa cum laude with a double major in just 3 years despite often missing classes and rarely sleeping. He was also nearly universally thought to be charming and attractive when younger. Michael was also really quite strange and I think the investment so many put into him despite the difficult aspects of his personality serves as some evidence of his charm.
After Yale, Michael went on to work at Bain Consulting (which to be fair is sort of an evil empire) and it was there he shifted from odd but charming to delusional and paranoid. He believed there were demons working at Bain (again, not impossible) and that the company had bugged his phone and office. He quit that job, ostensibly to write, and believed Bain was actively tracking him and plotting to snatch him back. I don't want to get into the story, read the book for that, but the network that formed around Michael is extraordinary. Eventually, Michael had a full-on psychotic break and he ended up inpatient for 9 months. There he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. Before the breakdown Michael had applied to and been accepted by Yale Law School and by-the-by, he decides to attend (again, there is a lot of story in the book.) The great Guido Calabrese was the legendary dean of Yale Law at the time (he later became a legendary judge) and he personally took Michael under his wing telling him that if he had a wheelchair they would make accommodations for him, and at Yale Law they would accommodate his schizophrenia. Again, there is a lot of story here, read the book. I will just say that Michael graduated, but was unemployable. He decided to write a book about his experiences at the suggestion of a well-known book agent who I believe had been a college classmate. Though he never completed the book, he wrote a treatment that was optioned by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and first Leo DiCaprio and then Brad Pitt were attached to play him. He became quite famous. He was featured in a widely read NYT article, looked to as a spokesperson for the mentally ill and even had a profile in People. Then he stabbed to death his long-time girlfriend, who was pregnant because he thought she was a wind-up doll trying to destroy him.
Michael Laudor remains in a facility for the criminally insane to this day. All that I have said is public record, and lots is on the jacket flap. The why and how is the question here, and Rosen casts a wide net (but not too wide). He speaks with so many people who knew Michael, with experts in the field, with Ellyn Saks, a schizophrenic law professor whose book "The Center Cannot Hold" has been on my TBR for years, and now I really need to get to it. He talks to religious leaders and law professors and Michael's friends and protectors. He plumbs his own memories of growing up in 1970's New Rochelle in a secular Jewish home with a professor father (Michael's father was also a professor) and a writer mother. Rosen is looking for answers, and he finds some but also makes clear that some things will never be answered. There is so much tragedy here. Caroline Costello's terrifying violent murder is, of course, the greatest tragedy. Rosen never forgets that in the book. She was a kind and brilliant woman herself who worked long hours for years on a project to improve public education and supported Michael even when that became difficult, and eventually deadly. Michael himself is a close second in magnitude of tragedy. He had no power to not do what he did. Years later it is not clear that even now he understands that he killed the person he most loved in the world. This was a brilliant ambitious man, with a good heart tortured by this terrible disease and its unremitting symptoms. There are other tragic figures here too. Michael's gruff demanding father who used all of his energy and volume to keep Michael moving forward and his mother who advocated for him tirelessly, only to see her work end with the death of a woman she loved and considered family at the hands of her very ill son. Tragic too are the professors, especially Dean Calabrese, who did everything possible (truly amazing things) to help a disabled student, to strive toward equity, only to have this ending be visited on them. There are mental health professionals, law enforcement officers, and friends who gave so much and who are haunted by this ending (in the case of some of them were also physically harmed by Michael.)
Rosen looks at 100 years of evolving public policy, law, psychiatry, and popular thought regarding mental health from the 1927 Buck decision (wherein the Supreme Court ruled the state could sterilize people with intellectual and mental disabilities without their consent because, as Justice Douglass said "three generations of imbeciles are enough") to the present. He also looks at family dynamics and cultural norms that play into illness. He looks at all of this with a compassionate yet unbiased eye. He has no agenda other than gaining some understanding and promoting greater knowledge and more thoughtful, reasoned empathic policy and treatment for the ill. Rosen says in his notes section at the end that one book he looked to modeled empathic investigation and the need to accept paradox. Maybe those things were modeled in that book, but I can attest that those things are displayed on every page of The Best Minds. This should be part of the liturgy for dealing with mental illness. We are in a moment where the mentally ill are vilified and their lives wholly devalued. Last week here in New York a mentally ill man was killed when placed in a chokehold after acting erratically on the F train. I was not there, it sounds scary and I assume that the man who killed him felt the delusional man represented a threat to him and others. In the city people have chosen up sides, with people who were not there deciding that the guy executing the chokehold should get the electric chair, and others who were also not there thinking this ex-Marine who killed a sick man to be a hero. Both are the wrong ways to look at this. There is plenty of tragedy to go around here. Let's just figure it out and maybe we can do better by everyone next time. Maybe we can get the sick man the help he needs and maybe we can try teaching people that one can often defuse a situation without physical violence. (The video does not show such efforts, though certainly they might have been tried and failed.)
I am going to shut up because this is really long already, but I have been imploring everyone I know to read this. Yesterday I implored my sister and my brother. Today my co-workers (I did not go to Yale law, but every faculty member I work with actually did, and I think they will find it particularly compelling -- Yale plays a huge role in this story.) I have recommended it to my BFF and to a couple of people here on GR. And now I beg you, whoever might be reading this, to read the book. And if you know anyone on the nominating committee for the National Book Award, or the Pulitzer Committee, or hell any book award nominating arm tell them I said they need to read this. Now.
June 7, 2023
I realize I am an extreme outlier in terms of my lack of enthusiasm for this book. It’s an autobiography of Rosen (which is not very interesting) intermixed with an extremely limited biography of Lauder. It didn’t fulfill any of its promises, whether those of the explicit title or of its implicit themes. What questions is Rosen really exploring? Others have said it needed a good editor, which yes but. . .an extremely good one.
There were some interesting sections on the history of mental illness, institutionalization and US law. Unfortunately they came after long digressions on Rosen’s own graduate school experiences in literary studies, including Derridean name-dropping.
I was hoping for an extremely complicated and compelling read, like _Hidden Valley Road_ or Vince Granata’s _Everything is Fine_ (also a Connecticut story). Expectations maybe too high.
There were some interesting sections on the history of mental illness, institutionalization and US law. Unfortunately they came after long digressions on Rosen’s own graduate school experiences in literary studies, including Derridean name-dropping.
I was hoping for an extremely complicated and compelling read, like _Hidden Valley Road_ or Vince Granata’s _Everything is Fine_ (also a Connecticut story). Expectations maybe too high.
June 17, 2023
I wanted to like this book more than I did. The core of the story is fascinating and tragic, and learning more in-depth about the history of community mental health, and mental health treatment in general, in the US was interesting. But I couldn't help but feel Rosen really needed a better editor. The whole book felt very rambling to me, and something about his tangential writing style really took me out of the story and at time even kind of confused me.
For instance, at one point he talks about the psychiatric facility where his friend is committed and how they had to raise the height of the fence several years before because two people escaped. But then he goes on to talk about those two individuals and detail their crimes, and it just feels...really irrelevant to the story. The whole book is like that, just a lot of divergent paths, whereas I think if about 150 pages had been shaved off, it would be a great book.
But Laudor's tale is tragic and provides a direct rebuke to the anti-stigma mental health crowd who know nothing about the debilitating and often catastrophic outcomes of real mental illness and its impact.
For instance, at one point he talks about the psychiatric facility where his friend is committed and how they had to raise the height of the fence several years before because two people escaped. But then he goes on to talk about those two individuals and detail their crimes, and it just feels...really irrelevant to the story. The whole book is like that, just a lot of divergent paths, whereas I think if about 150 pages had been shaved off, it would be a great book.
But Laudor's tale is tragic and provides a direct rebuke to the anti-stigma mental health crowd who know nothing about the debilitating and often catastrophic outcomes of real mental illness and its impact.
May 20, 2023
Audiobook…..read by Jonathan Rosen
…..16 hours and 44 minutes
“Being smart, was supposed to keep the “Angel-of -Madness” away —
“The brain is wider than the sky”
—-Emily Dickenson
“There are no schizophrenics. There are people with schizophrenia and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your coworker”.
—Elyn Saks
“There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not need to lead to a painful and oblique life”.
—Elyn Saks
“Doctors had warned Michael not to write because he couldn’t control his imagination”. (I find this sentence maddening and sad : Both)…. I also re-felt sad for David Foster Wallace.
A little about the author:
*Jonathan Rosen* graduated from Yale and began graduate studies working towards a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. He dropped out of graduate school to become a writer.
Jonathan’s childhood friend:
*Michael Laudor* graduated from Yale law school and made national headlines in 1995 for having successfully graduated, while suffering from schizophrenia; and again in 1998 for stabbing his pregnant fiancé, Caroline Costello, to death during an episode of psychosis.
Laudor was committed to the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center in New Hampton, New York, and remains institutionalized there still today.
“Thousands of people with severe mental illness have been failed by a dysfunctional system. My friend Michael was one of them. 25 years ago, he killed the person he loved most.”
A few thoughts & feelings from me:
…..I’m sad! How can I not be? It’s a VERY COMPLICATED TRAGIC STORY!!!
We still have much to learn about mental illnesses.
…..I’m exhausted and spent. The audiobook ‘felt’ very long to me. I ‘do’ see the reasons and benefits though! I really do!!
…..I finished the last few chapters of this audiobook reclining on top of my bed resting ….
My body and mind needed my ‘own’ calm.
D a y s of spending time with this book - its content - became mentally taxing…..
……but there was an abundance of strong points— both personal & resourceful in the pursuit of valuable data science — covering a wealth of mental health information.
….. I’m a little biased when I say this part: I enjoyed learning about Jonathan’s time spent in Berkeley. I actually had a few laughs. By the time Jonathan arrived in Berkeley, with the intention of getting a PhD…… the ‘counter’ culture was simply ‘culture’.
So true!
Jonathan is such a natural storyteller— (he couldn’t possibly have written the heart of this story without added spicy seasoning)…..
he goes on a rampage of tangents—sharing about ‘many’ different topics:
parents, Jewish family experiences (for both Jonathan and Michael), jewish, camp, education, childhood memories, friendships, competition temple participation, hallucinations, buddhism, spiritualism, eugenics, politics and social issues, authors, (Joseph Campbell, Jack Kerouac, James, Baldwin, etc.), writing, publishing, odd jobs, living lifestyles, and many facts….
“It was impossible for Michael to get work with a diagnosis of schizophrenia”…..
etc etc etc…..
Jonathan even touched on football, and a bolt of lightning.
I’m sure he mentioned (haha) the ‘kitchen sink’ somewhere as well, but I may have forgotten that part….
but
MOST IMPORTANTLY…..
I liked the wide variety of topics, themes, stories, research, information.
There was SO MUCH—
to take in!!!!!
My compassion for Jonathan grew throughout — in that — I don’t think he could have edited this book. Sometimes I wanted the book to end already — it’s hard work being with this topic for d a y s . . . .
but —
NOW … that I’m done — I feel a great sense of satisfaction!
I feel a great sense of pride — admiration — appreciation to the whole fricken-world.
I cried towards the end — either from pure exhaustion or a culmination from a week of my own stress.
Blessings & thank you Tooter who inspired my interest in reading (audio-ing) this book.
….My overall thoughts about Michael Laudor:
It’s complicated!!!
But, I agree — we must learn from him.
Yet, it’s not easy. It’s hard to be subjective and scientific about severe mental illness.
At the end when Jonathan Rosen was expressing how grateful he was to the many people who gave him encouragement to write this book - family & friends - their faith - their support — etc ….
I realized I, too, am grateful to all these people (and Jonathan Rosen of course).
This book is **humongous** in scope….
….it’s a great successful contribution to the mystery around mental health diseases.
Satisfied and spent!!!
…..16 hours and 44 minutes
“Being smart, was supposed to keep the “Angel-of -Madness” away —
“The brain is wider than the sky”
—-Emily Dickenson
“There are no schizophrenics. There are people with schizophrenia and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your coworker”.
—Elyn Saks
“There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not need to lead to a painful and oblique life”.
—Elyn Saks
“Doctors had warned Michael not to write because he couldn’t control his imagination”. (I find this sentence maddening and sad : Both)…. I also re-felt sad for David Foster Wallace.
A little about the author:
*Jonathan Rosen* graduated from Yale and began graduate studies working towards a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. He dropped out of graduate school to become a writer.
Jonathan’s childhood friend:
*Michael Laudor* graduated from Yale law school and made national headlines in 1995 for having successfully graduated, while suffering from schizophrenia; and again in 1998 for stabbing his pregnant fiancé, Caroline Costello, to death during an episode of psychosis.
Laudor was committed to the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center in New Hampton, New York, and remains institutionalized there still today.
“Thousands of people with severe mental illness have been failed by a dysfunctional system. My friend Michael was one of them. 25 years ago, he killed the person he loved most.”
A few thoughts & feelings from me:
…..I’m sad! How can I not be? It’s a VERY COMPLICATED TRAGIC STORY!!!
We still have much to learn about mental illnesses.
…..I’m exhausted and spent. The audiobook ‘felt’ very long to me. I ‘do’ see the reasons and benefits though! I really do!!
…..I finished the last few chapters of this audiobook reclining on top of my bed resting ….
My body and mind needed my ‘own’ calm.
D a y s of spending time with this book - its content - became mentally taxing…..
……but there was an abundance of strong points— both personal & resourceful in the pursuit of valuable data science — covering a wealth of mental health information.
….. I’m a little biased when I say this part: I enjoyed learning about Jonathan’s time spent in Berkeley. I actually had a few laughs. By the time Jonathan arrived in Berkeley, with the intention of getting a PhD…… the ‘counter’ culture was simply ‘culture’.
So true!
Jonathan is such a natural storyteller— (he couldn’t possibly have written the heart of this story without added spicy seasoning)…..
he goes on a rampage of tangents—sharing about ‘many’ different topics:
parents, Jewish family experiences (for both Jonathan and Michael), jewish, camp, education, childhood memories, friendships, competition temple participation, hallucinations, buddhism, spiritualism, eugenics, politics and social issues, authors, (Joseph Campbell, Jack Kerouac, James, Baldwin, etc.), writing, publishing, odd jobs, living lifestyles, and many facts….
“It was impossible for Michael to get work with a diagnosis of schizophrenia”…..
etc etc etc…..
Jonathan even touched on football, and a bolt of lightning.
I’m sure he mentioned (haha) the ‘kitchen sink’ somewhere as well, but I may have forgotten that part….
but
MOST IMPORTANTLY…..
I liked the wide variety of topics, themes, stories, research, information.
There was SO MUCH—
to take in!!!!!
My compassion for Jonathan grew throughout — in that — I don’t think he could have edited this book. Sometimes I wanted the book to end already — it’s hard work being with this topic for d a y s . . . .
but —
NOW … that I’m done — I feel a great sense of satisfaction!
I feel a great sense of pride — admiration — appreciation to the whole fricken-world.
I cried towards the end — either from pure exhaustion or a culmination from a week of my own stress.
Blessings & thank you Tooter who inspired my interest in reading (audio-ing) this book.
….My overall thoughts about Michael Laudor:
It’s complicated!!!
But, I agree — we must learn from him.
Yet, it’s not easy. It’s hard to be subjective and scientific about severe mental illness.
At the end when Jonathan Rosen was expressing how grateful he was to the many people who gave him encouragement to write this book - family & friends - their faith - their support — etc ….
I realized I, too, am grateful to all these people (and Jonathan Rosen of course).
This book is **humongous** in scope….
….it’s a great successful contribution to the mystery around mental health diseases.
Satisfied and spent!!!
July 7, 2025
Notes:
1. The review of the sixties’ so-called “counter-culture“ — I use the term advisedly since it’s a misnomer of conservative origin — is superb. This is the context in which the author and his subject, Michael Laudor, grew up. Michael, despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, completes a Yale law degree in three years. This brings him first to the attention of the New York Times, and subsequently to filmmaker Ron Howard, who, in association with Universal Pictures, offers Michael $1.5 million for his story. There’s also a $600K deal with Scribners for a book to be called The Laws of Madness, same as the movie. Then he kills his pregnant girlfriend.
2. The author has a very discursive approach. A key point for me: though suffering from an unimaginable illness, Laudor is an egomaniacal asshole who becomes sympathetic only in his desire to help the downtrodden— by way of mental health advocacy, etc. — whom he counts himself among.
3. The book’s shiving of postmodernism (deconstructionism, post-structuralism) is deeply satisfying. Here’s just a piece:
“Michel Foucault even considered AIDS a social construct, waving away the warning he received from the writer Edmund White in the early 1980s when he was teaching at Berkeley. ‘You American puritans, you're always inventing diseases,’ Foucault told White, though people were already dying of AIDS, most conspicuously gay men like Foucault himself, who had plunged into San Francisco's bathhouse scene in the orgiastic seventies and remained passionately devoted to anonymous drug-fueled sadomasochistic sex. Still, he preferred to see the disease, which killed him the year before I got to graduate school, as an imaginary disorder, ‘and one that singles out blacks, drug users and gays—how perfect!’” (p. 188)
4. Of course, all of this is undergirded by nutty Marxist thought (so called) run amok. Get a load of this:
“A decade after introducing Europe to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre wrote the preface to a booklet called Turn Illness into a Weapon . . . The authors were members of the Socialist Patients' Collective, whose slogans were ‘Kill, kill, kill for inner peace’ and ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb for mental health.’ …
“The group's founder, a German psychiatrist named Wolfgang Huber, believed that capitalism was making his patients ill and that the only cure was revolution. His motto was ‘Crazies, to arms!’
“Huber . . . created the collective while working at the University of Heidelberg's psychiatric-neurological clinic in 1970. When the university fired him, his student-patients occupied a portion of the university and threatened both mass suicide and violence, a persuasive tactic in those days.
“The university reinstated Dr. Huber, giving him extra space in the university clinic. To group therapy, hashish, and the study of dialectical materialism, Huber added workshops in martial arts and explosives. When one of his patients jumped to her death because she ‘did not get along with Marx and Lenin,’ as she wrote in her suicide note, Dr. Huber blamed the university and declared all-out war.
“The members of the collective had read The Wretched of the Earth as a mental health handbook and referenced it in their manifesto, exaggerating its claims about the salutary benefits of violence: ‘Not only did psychiatric symptoms clear up for the freedom fighters but also seemingly chronic physical ailments disappeared, such as spinal disc disease, gastric ulcers, muscle spasms, etc.’
“By the time Turn Illness into a Weapon was published in 1972, Wolfgang Huber and several members of his collective had been arrested for acts of terrorism.” (p. 225)
5. JFK signed legislation that deinstitutionalized mental health in USA and provided a chimerical alternative in the form of unfunded community mental health centers. The lack of community mental health treatment services we live with today is the farflung result of that bill.
And when the moment comes decades later and Michael is about to kill his pregnant fiancée, every knowledgeable psychiatrist around him, and there were many, eschew institutionalization because they fear it will be permanently damaging.
“The danger that weighed most heavily on [them] was that Michael would suffer a break from which he might never recover; that he would end up with a hospitalization that would never end, despite the trend of emptying beds and closing hospitals. They doubted the efficacy of the system but feared its capacity for destruction and were determined to save him from it.” (p. 423)
So in keeping with the protocols of the time — deinstitutionalization — Michael walks free and kills.
6. I have a fascination for mental health memoirs. I’ve read about a dozen or so such books, among them: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreiber; Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, this more of a multi-persona biography than a memoir; William Styron’s Darkness Visible; Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind; Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon; Frigyes Karinthy’s A Journey Round My Skull; and The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang. The last here is a recent publication and completely enthralling.
The Best Minds is an absolutely astonishing book.
1. The review of the sixties’ so-called “counter-culture“ — I use the term advisedly since it’s a misnomer of conservative origin — is superb. This is the context in which the author and his subject, Michael Laudor, grew up. Michael, despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, completes a Yale law degree in three years. This brings him first to the attention of the New York Times, and subsequently to filmmaker Ron Howard, who, in association with Universal Pictures, offers Michael $1.5 million for his story. There’s also a $600K deal with Scribners for a book to be called The Laws of Madness, same as the movie. Then he kills his pregnant girlfriend.
2. The author has a very discursive approach. A key point for me: though suffering from an unimaginable illness, Laudor is an egomaniacal asshole who becomes sympathetic only in his desire to help the downtrodden— by way of mental health advocacy, etc. — whom he counts himself among.
3. The book’s shiving of postmodernism (deconstructionism, post-structuralism) is deeply satisfying. Here’s just a piece:
“Michel Foucault even considered AIDS a social construct, waving away the warning he received from the writer Edmund White in the early 1980s when he was teaching at Berkeley. ‘You American puritans, you're always inventing diseases,’ Foucault told White, though people were already dying of AIDS, most conspicuously gay men like Foucault himself, who had plunged into San Francisco's bathhouse scene in the orgiastic seventies and remained passionately devoted to anonymous drug-fueled sadomasochistic sex. Still, he preferred to see the disease, which killed him the year before I got to graduate school, as an imaginary disorder, ‘and one that singles out blacks, drug users and gays—how perfect!’” (p. 188)
4. Of course, all of this is undergirded by nutty Marxist thought (so called) run amok. Get a load of this:
“A decade after introducing Europe to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre wrote the preface to a booklet called Turn Illness into a Weapon . . . The authors were members of the Socialist Patients' Collective, whose slogans were ‘Kill, kill, kill for inner peace’ and ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb for mental health.’ …
“The group's founder, a German psychiatrist named Wolfgang Huber, believed that capitalism was making his patients ill and that the only cure was revolution. His motto was ‘Crazies, to arms!’
“Huber . . . created the collective while working at the University of Heidelberg's psychiatric-neurological clinic in 1970. When the university fired him, his student-patients occupied a portion of the university and threatened both mass suicide and violence, a persuasive tactic in those days.
“The university reinstated Dr. Huber, giving him extra space in the university clinic. To group therapy, hashish, and the study of dialectical materialism, Huber added workshops in martial arts and explosives. When one of his patients jumped to her death because she ‘did not get along with Marx and Lenin,’ as she wrote in her suicide note, Dr. Huber blamed the university and declared all-out war.
“The members of the collective had read The Wretched of the Earth as a mental health handbook and referenced it in their manifesto, exaggerating its claims about the salutary benefits of violence: ‘Not only did psychiatric symptoms clear up for the freedom fighters but also seemingly chronic physical ailments disappeared, such as spinal disc disease, gastric ulcers, muscle spasms, etc.’
“By the time Turn Illness into a Weapon was published in 1972, Wolfgang Huber and several members of his collective had been arrested for acts of terrorism.” (p. 225)
5. JFK signed legislation that deinstitutionalized mental health in USA and provided a chimerical alternative in the form of unfunded community mental health centers. The lack of community mental health treatment services we live with today is the farflung result of that bill.
And when the moment comes decades later and Michael is about to kill his pregnant fiancée, every knowledgeable psychiatrist around him, and there were many, eschew institutionalization because they fear it will be permanently damaging.
“The danger that weighed most heavily on [them] was that Michael would suffer a break from which he might never recover; that he would end up with a hospitalization that would never end, despite the trend of emptying beds and closing hospitals. They doubted the efficacy of the system but feared its capacity for destruction and were determined to save him from it.” (p. 423)
So in keeping with the protocols of the time — deinstitutionalization — Michael walks free and kills.
6. I have a fascination for mental health memoirs. I’ve read about a dozen or so such books, among them: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreiber; Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, this more of a multi-persona biography than a memoir; William Styron’s Darkness Visible; Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind; Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon; Frigyes Karinthy’s A Journey Round My Skull; and The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang. The last here is a recent publication and completely enthralling.
The Best Minds is an absolutely astonishing book.
July 31, 2023
A somewhat pretentious history of psychological (psycho-law) moments spanning roughly 30 years. I’m not sure why the author would have a subtitle mentioning friendship when that aspect seems only relevant during a few formative years but then repeatedly mentions disdain, disinterest, and distance. The actual story of “his friend” could be slimmed to a mere 200 pages, while the rest mostly reads as a textbook for referencing dates, cases, books, and people.
The friendship aspect of this mental health memoir is when its author and his friend Michael are kids in school because they grew up on the same street. There's a lot of detail about the world at the time, about what led their parents to this street. Fine and dandy, let's build the world. But then there's a divide before they even finish school -more like a few, actually- and the two seem to stop being friends despite acting civil and friendly when the opportunity arises. This trend continues into college where they're not close but remain in vague contact, mostly when back home. Jonathan is constantly comparing himself to Michael, and it gets pretty tiring real fast. There's this edge of jealousy and resentment among the praise and admiration all jumbled up in the memory of a young, "fated" friendship. The author was persuaded to stay in touch with Michael because of people in their lives (parents, former friends or colleagues, mentors and teachers, community leaders) more than out of a sense of loyalty, friendship, and desire.
The account of Michael's madness isn't up close and personal. It seems like a majority of the information in the book could be found in reading old reports, interviews, news stories about Michael at the time. Most of the more personal recollections of his madness are from other people rather than Jon himself. And it reads like interviews and recollections, not fond memories, however tainted they may have become.
As for the good intentions, I wonder if the author was trying to initiate some of them himself by only briefly touching on Carrie herself. While he admits to not knowing her, considering all the lengths gone into for a lackluster childhood, side stories about events, books, cases at the time, it was surprising nothing much was said about her. Even when she was, likely, the most important part of Michael's life. I remain undecided about whether Jonathan was trying to be respectful so as to not cause some commotion over the awful event her family has since been enduring, or it was intentional to make her as absolutely small as possible (again, both in life and death). There's so much detail about most of the other people in Michael's life, so it does seem a tragedy to skate over the one woman who was always by his side.
Our author had a lackluster recording of his life interspersed throughout the long 500+ pages and the retelling of Michael's life seems hardly more personal than some journalist digging up these facts themselves. All and all a deeply disappointing read with a misleading title and blurb.
The friendship aspect of this mental health memoir is when its author and his friend Michael are kids in school because they grew up on the same street. There's a lot of detail about the world at the time, about what led their parents to this street. Fine and dandy, let's build the world. But then there's a divide before they even finish school -more like a few, actually- and the two seem to stop being friends despite acting civil and friendly when the opportunity arises. This trend continues into college where they're not close but remain in vague contact, mostly when back home. Jonathan is constantly comparing himself to Michael, and it gets pretty tiring real fast. There's this edge of jealousy and resentment among the praise and admiration all jumbled up in the memory of a young, "fated" friendship. The author was persuaded to stay in touch with Michael because of people in their lives (parents, former friends or colleagues, mentors and teachers, community leaders) more than out of a sense of loyalty, friendship, and desire.
The account of Michael's madness isn't up close and personal. It seems like a majority of the information in the book could be found in reading old reports, interviews, news stories about Michael at the time. Most of the more personal recollections of his madness are from other people rather than Jon himself. And it reads like interviews and recollections, not fond memories, however tainted they may have become.
As for the good intentions, I wonder if the author was trying to initiate some of them himself by only briefly touching on Carrie herself. While he admits to not knowing her, considering all the lengths gone into for a lackluster childhood, side stories about events, books, cases at the time, it was surprising nothing much was said about her. Even when she was, likely, the most important part of Michael's life. I remain undecided about whether Jonathan was trying to be respectful so as to not cause some commotion over the awful event her family has since been enduring, or it was intentional to make her as absolutely small as possible (again, both in life and death). There's so much detail about most of the other people in Michael's life, so it does seem a tragedy to skate over the one woman who was always by his side.
Our author had a lackluster recording of his life interspersed throughout the long 500+ pages and the retelling of Michael's life seems hardly more personal than some journalist digging up these facts themselves. All and all a deeply disappointing read with a misleading title and blurb.
May 14, 2023
5 Stars
January 10, 2024
I am extremely surprised this book has landed on the times best of the year list and that it has received such accolades. Overall, the book is extremely rambling and disjointed and needed better editing to tell a cohesive story. The back and forth between Michael’s story and the history of psychiatry pieces was hard to follow and did not meld together well. The author would have benefited from thinking more about the overall message and better merging these ideas (or in many instances just deleting them).
However, my biggest issue with this book is the author himself. It seems like complete misappropriation for him - someone who admittedly does not himself have any significant mental health issues - to use this book to make money off of the story of his friend’s psychological breakdown. A friend who he effectively was barely in touch with for the better part of 20 years. A biographer with experience with schizophrenia who was not trying to promote themselves would have done a better job. The author’s own feelings also just muddied the picture and we’re frankly annoying and took away from the actual story. And his jealousy of Michael that comes through across the book makes me question his motives in making money off his friend even more. The whole thing just makes me feel icky.
However, my biggest issue with this book is the author himself. It seems like complete misappropriation for him - someone who admittedly does not himself have any significant mental health issues - to use this book to make money off of the story of his friend’s psychological breakdown. A friend who he effectively was barely in touch with for the better part of 20 years. A biographer with experience with schizophrenia who was not trying to promote themselves would have done a better job. The author’s own feelings also just muddied the picture and we’re frankly annoying and took away from the actual story. And his jealousy of Michael that comes through across the book makes me question his motives in making money off his friend even more. The whole thing just makes me feel icky.
March 13, 2024
asks the question: what if your friend who HATES YOU wrote a memoir about your entire life?
July 26, 2023
TMI TMI. Where the hell is the editor? I’m not giving up yet but seriously the verbosity of this book is killing me. However some parts had me rolling such as the description of reading material given to kids in public schools in the 70s called SRAs which were described as “ laminated cards featuring passages of fiction or non fiction - it didn’t matter as long as it was boring”. So true. There’s hope yet. I’ll keep reading. I hope they grow up soon. As an adult I really hate wallowing in the childhood portions of a novel.
In the end it was TMBI. (B for boring). I didn’t finish it. Left his buddy in law school. Never found out the ending and don’t care.
In the end it was TMBI. (B for boring). I didn’t finish it. Left his buddy in law school. Never found out the ending and don’t care.
February 24, 2024
***3.5 Stars*** I was so intrigued with the topic detailed within the title. It was engaging, but I felt that it would have been better without so much extraneous information.
For me, a more compelling and personal family story of the diagnosis of schizophrenia was Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.
For me, a more compelling and personal family story of the diagnosis of schizophrenia was Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.
August 7, 2023
Whose story was this to tell and to profit from? Heartbreaking.
October 15, 2023
There are numerous memoirs of mental illness and more biographies of true crime. What makes The Best Minds stand out is that Jonathon Rosen wrote as Michael Laudor’s childhood best friend: a friend who admired Laudor’s vast intellect, amazing memory, charisma, and ease of solving, resolving intellectual problems. He also observed, albeit at a greater distance, Laudor’s first psychotic break, his time at Yale Law School, and his subsequent decline in less supportive circumstances.
At some points, especially at the beginning of The Best Minds, the detail and name-dropping felt excessive. Yes, they were from a privileged area, although not as wealthy as many of the other citizens of New Rochelle, NY. Laudor’s intellect, charm, and connections bought him many advantages, including this 1995 profile in the New York Times, which gave him many opportunities to advocate for the mentally ill.
One of the things you gain from Rosen’s narrative is a detailed (overly detailed?) description of the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding his life and the shortfalls of mental health care. Many of these descriptions are useful, as when he was encouraged to cashier at Macy’s following his release from his first hospitalization – a man who chose to go to Yale Law instead. Laudor complained about this, but Rosen did not consider the downside of either option or better alternatives. There are no easy solutions for very bright and capable people for whom stress puts them at risk.
Laudor and others who have serious mental illnesses are less likely to be violent than to become the victims of violence, yet one cannot help but feel for Carolyn Costello and her family. His right to choose and refuse treatment cost her life and their unborn child. It also cost him his freedom for 25+ years, as he remains hospitalized in Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center in New Hampton, NY.
At some points, especially at the beginning of The Best Minds, the detail and name-dropping felt excessive. Yes, they were from a privileged area, although not as wealthy as many of the other citizens of New Rochelle, NY. Laudor’s intellect, charm, and connections bought him many advantages, including this 1995 profile in the New York Times, which gave him many opportunities to advocate for the mentally ill.
One of the things you gain from Rosen’s narrative is a detailed (overly detailed?) description of the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding his life and the shortfalls of mental health care. Many of these descriptions are useful, as when he was encouraged to cashier at Macy’s following his release from his first hospitalization – a man who chose to go to Yale Law instead. Laudor complained about this, but Rosen did not consider the downside of either option or better alternatives. There are no easy solutions for very bright and capable people for whom stress puts them at risk.
Laudor and others who have serious mental illnesses are less likely to be violent than to become the victims of violence, yet one cannot help but feel for Carolyn Costello and her family. His right to choose and refuse treatment cost her life and their unborn child. It also cost him his freedom for 25+ years, as he remains hospitalized in Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center in New Hampton, NY.
January 22, 2024
DNF'd at about 30% - my first DNF since starting to record books on Goodreads. The prose of this book is ornate to the point of maddening, and I cynically suspect it is to obscure the issue that the author barely knew the subject of the book at the time of his early symptoms or diagnosis - they were childhood friends that parted, not particularly peacefully, after high school. I thought this was a biography of Michael Laudor, but it's actually largely a memoir of the author - a memoir that goes into inane detail about things that have nothing to do with mental health, or anything really (see the multi-page discussion on how public schools in the 1960s taught about Inuit culture, or a hundred other examples).
If you want to learn about the failures of the US mental healthcare system and why our current system is set up like it is, read Mind Fixers by Anne Harrington. If you want to read a personal narrative of someone with schizophrenia who beat the odds and graduated from Yale Law School, read The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks.
If you want to read an overlong book that never gets to any sort of point and includes sentences like "somehow, mental illness had become the indispensable elixir of literary theory, not just the vermouth but the gin, the olive, and the glass" on every page, read this book I suppose.
If you want to learn about the failures of the US mental healthcare system and why our current system is set up like it is, read Mind Fixers by Anne Harrington. If you want to read a personal narrative of someone with schizophrenia who beat the odds and graduated from Yale Law School, read The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks.
If you want to read an overlong book that never gets to any sort of point and includes sentences like "somehow, mental illness had become the indispensable elixir of literary theory, not just the vermouth but the gin, the olive, and the glass" on every page, read this book I suppose.
October 2, 2023
I don't even know where to begin. This is a story of two bookish childhood friends, both chasing their dream to become a writer, whose paths fork in a really tragic way. But it is also so much more than that. Jonathan Rosen has crafted a brilliant, compassionate memoir that wraps together the extremely complicated bonds of childhood friendships and family, the complexities of mental illness, and the shortfalls of public policy.
I cannot emphasize the words "complex" and "complicated" enough while describing this book. Rosen's recounting of Michael Laudor's personal struggle with schizophrenia is heartbreaking on its own, but the story becomes more disquieting with Rosen's poignant observations about the muddled divide between brilliance and insanity. Rosen layers the story with research, history, and anecdotes, resulting in a deep exploration of mental illness covering public policy, social perceptions, legal arguments and rulings, academic life, religion, and evolving psychiatric approaches. Rosen covers a number of distressing aspects of Laudor's story with thought-provoking candor, such as the uncomfortable associations between violence and mental illness as well as society's potent admiration for those who overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges to achieve success. It's impossible to read this book and not start to reevaluate your own understanding, beliefs, and perceptions about mental illness.
A huge thanks to my GR friend Bonnie for putting this one on my radar. She said it was my kind of book, and she was absolutely correct in her assessment. It's smart, deeply thoughtful, heartbreaking, compassionate, and really uncomfortable at times. This book easily claimed a spot in my top reads of the year, and I will no doubt be thinking about it for a long long time.
I cannot emphasize the words "complex" and "complicated" enough while describing this book. Rosen's recounting of Michael Laudor's personal struggle with schizophrenia is heartbreaking on its own, but the story becomes more disquieting with Rosen's poignant observations about the muddled divide between brilliance and insanity. Rosen layers the story with research, history, and anecdotes, resulting in a deep exploration of mental illness covering public policy, social perceptions, legal arguments and rulings, academic life, religion, and evolving psychiatric approaches. Rosen covers a number of distressing aspects of Laudor's story with thought-provoking candor, such as the uncomfortable associations between violence and mental illness as well as society's potent admiration for those who overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges to achieve success. It's impossible to read this book and not start to reevaluate your own understanding, beliefs, and perceptions about mental illness.
A huge thanks to my GR friend Bonnie for putting this one on my radar. She said it was my kind of book, and she was absolutely correct in her assessment. It's smart, deeply thoughtful, heartbreaking, compassionate, and really uncomfortable at times. This book easily claimed a spot in my top reads of the year, and I will no doubt be thinking about it for a long long time.
August 25, 2023
Hmmmm. I really really wanted to like this book. The reviews were great. I love memoir. But I did not - could not - finish it. And I tried. Four times.
I feel like this really needed a big edit. I got bogged down in the academic narratives about post-moderism, literary critque, etc. And I'm an academic!
I understand that the author is trying to situate Michael's story in the context of the times, but it loses the thread and occasionally the story. The story is compelling. The book was not.
For awhile I started to just skim over these parts - skipping pages at a time - to try and keep the train of the story. Then I decided it was too much and stopped at page 217. Who knows, I may pick it up again. I keep thinking if I keep reading I will figure out why so many people give this such high reviews. What am I missing?
I feel like this really needed a big edit. I got bogged down in the academic narratives about post-moderism, literary critque, etc. And I'm an academic!
I understand that the author is trying to situate Michael's story in the context of the times, but it loses the thread and occasionally the story. The story is compelling. The book was not.
For awhile I started to just skim over these parts - skipping pages at a time - to try and keep the train of the story. Then I decided it was too much and stopped at page 217. Who knows, I may pick it up again. I keep thinking if I keep reading I will figure out why so many people give this such high reviews. What am I missing?
December 8, 2023
I liked this book a lot but also felt like I didn't like this book that much. The writing is really good, the storytelling is well crafted and complex. I appreciated what the author was doing by using Michael (and his) life to tell a bigger story about a generation and mental health etc. I also struggled with the glorification of Michael, and wondered a lot about his "genius" and the relationship to the harms he did. The whiteness of this book is oppressive which I struggled with. I also had a hard time with Rosen's admiration for Michael and the sense there was something for him to gain personally with this story. Overall I think Rosen it pulls it off, but something about this book just never quite sat right with me. I could never be all in.
July 27, 2023
Much too meandering for my taste. No way this book should be on the wrong side of 500 pages.
September 8, 2023
Grossly overwritten. Focuses too much on the author's own angst and need to be understood. If you know nothing about the MH system from the 1970s thru the 2000s, you will learn a lot of disturbing things. I worked within it during all those years and there was nothing new here. There are a lot of more cogent books out there about the failures of the deinstitutionalization and so called recovery movement( ie anything by E.Fuller Torrey). There are hundreds of thousands stories out there more horrendous than Louder's, if you have the stomach to seek them out. I fear the author thinks he has broken new ground here, when in reality he has simply, in very wordy, narcissistic fashion, told an old story.
February 24, 2024
I did not like this book. The key to me is in the title: Best Minds. The author clearly thinks he is one of them. The other best mind is his friend from his youth, Michael Laudor. They are both brilliant.
The basic plot of the book is pretty straightforward. The author and Michael are childhood friends, growing up in the same neighborhood outside New York City. They both end up at Yale. Michael goes on to Yale Law School, I suppose because he is the more brilliant of the two, even though his schizophrenia has kicked in by then. Nevertheless, he is on first name speaking terms with the Dean of the Law School. Michael gets a cool job at Bain. He kills his girlfriend, Caroline Costello. By then then it seems the author has lost touch with Michael. There is then a lot of mumbo jumbo about the interplay between the mental health system and the legal system. Michael ends up in an institution for the criminally insane. That's basically it, over 500 pages of it.
I can't believe I read the whole thing. One of the reasons I did is that I wanted to learn something about Caroline, the girlfriend Michael killed, who she was was, why she was attracted to him, what her friends thought of him, why she stayed with him. No such luck.
This book is based on the premise that mental illness is somehow worse if it afflicts someone who is brilliant, who seems to have unlimited opportunities ahead, as opposed to someone who is simply ordinary. I suppose the author would think that is true of any illness, or any misfortune, such as paralysis from an automobile accident. I suppose Caroline, who was killed by Michael, would fall into that category. I find that offensive.
I cannot recommend this book.
The basic plot of the book is pretty straightforward. The author and Michael are childhood friends, growing up in the same neighborhood outside New York City. They both end up at Yale. Michael goes on to Yale Law School, I suppose because he is the more brilliant of the two, even though his schizophrenia has kicked in by then. Nevertheless, he is on first name speaking terms with the Dean of the Law School. Michael gets a cool job at Bain. He kills his girlfriend, Caroline Costello. By then then it seems the author has lost touch with Michael. There is then a lot of mumbo jumbo about the interplay between the mental health system and the legal system. Michael ends up in an institution for the criminally insane. That's basically it, over 500 pages of it.
I can't believe I read the whole thing. One of the reasons I did is that I wanted to learn something about Caroline, the girlfriend Michael killed, who she was was, why she was attracted to him, what her friends thought of him, why she stayed with him. No such luck.
This book is based on the premise that mental illness is somehow worse if it afflicts someone who is brilliant, who seems to have unlimited opportunities ahead, as opposed to someone who is simply ordinary. I suppose the author would think that is true of any illness, or any misfortune, such as paralysis from an automobile accident. I suppose Caroline, who was killed by Michael, would fall into that category. I find that offensive.
I cannot recommend this book.
November 26, 2023
Exploitative and at least 200 pages too long
January 5, 2024
I’m extremely interested in the events that happened and on the subject of schizophrenia (of which I have some education on), however I could not finish this book. The author’s verbose writing included so many mundane details, random topics and went off on weird tangents that bogged down the main story line and ultimately lost me. He also included way too much on his own life that did relate to Laudor. My impression from this book is Rosen did not seem to be much of a friend to Laudor at all.
August 23, 2023
Needs an editor. Overly long without much payoff in the end.
February 8, 2024
‘The Best Minds - A Story of Friendship, Madness and the Tragedy of Good Intentions’ by Jonathan Rosen is number one on my ‘best non-fiction I’ve read this year’ list. It is dense (necessarily), a well-researched history as well as a well-written memoir/biography/autobiography about people intimately involved with a murder which apparently struck close to home for a lot of the people who are part of the American intelligentsia. A Yale graduate, a genius, murdered his pregnant fiancée because he believed she was a robot or a doll. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
I had never heard of this particular case of murder, but I guess it was on the front pages of all of the mainstream papers. What I do know is that the book struck close to home for me too. I am not from the east coast of America, nor am I a member of the intelligentsia class. But having had mental illness in my family, and in growing up in the period of time discussed in the book about when President Reagan closed down most of the hospitals for the mentally ill after promising to provide aid for group homes for them, which he and Congress never did, resulting in astronomical numbers of family tragedies and many murders by mentally unstable family members, I couldn’t put the book down. While I lived through the period of time the author discusses, I had not known a lot of the political history of why the mental health clinics that had been open in every district of Seattle for low-income people who needed a psychiatrist suddenly all closed. I WAS aware of the catastrophic results, not only of the murders written about in the newspapers of parents by their schizophrenic adult children who could not (and many of these mentally ill adults would not get help even if the resources had been available) get treatment or medication, but because of the huge increase of people living on the streets that were obviously and visibly linked to untreated mental illness.
That said, I must also say the vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous to others, other than being the cause of chaos and sadness their family members suffer. However, a subset of the mentally ill can be very very dangerous. In any case, all of society loses because of the lack of inexpensive psychiatric care or the not having of any available resources at all in many areas for the treatment of the mentally ill in America. Congress has often publicly whined for the purpose of polishing their image up in the media about the tragedies caused by untreated mental illness. Many politicians have made promises of helping the mentally ill by introducing many various bills for care of the mentally ill in Congress - which they never fund, even when they pass the bill authorizing care. The only place which has reliably housed the mentally ill, but still not helping with psychiatric care, is our prisons. Study after study by different groups for decades keeps coming up with the figure of 80% of the people incarcerated suffer from some sort of mental illness. Much of this and more is discussed in the book.
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
“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 news 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.”
I am including links to some of the professional critics from many of the major newspapers who reviewed Rosen’s book. I hope they are not behind a paywall for you, gentle reader. I was able to read them, anyway.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/bo...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best...
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
There is a YouTube interview with the author :
https://youtu.be/2zAOYrInd30?si=68jlx...
This subject of what to do for and about the mentally ill makes me crazy, gentle reader, and I am only joking a little bit. Personally, I think we need to build and fund the clinics and the hospitals, and we need to implement involuntary commitment laws. The group homes which were intended to be established in the 1970’s should happen NOW.
I think everyone has experienced a time of being mentally unbalanced and needed help from something or someone. I don’t have any answers about the stigma of being mentally unbalanced whether temporary or mild, or chronic, or dangerous. The social stigma of mental illness is very real and often very destructive to one’s life. There are so many ways to be mentally ill, and each person needs individual assessment and individual treatment, with an experimenting of drugs to find the right one that works best for the involved individual if drugs are needed. I certainly can’t force politicians to understand that mental illness is, in my opinion, behind at least half of the social ills that cause disruption and tragedy we are all reading about every day in social media, which makes it a number one issue they should be addressing. Most worrying and often the most destructive of all, answering the question of what to do when someone is chronically mentally ill but that person refuses to seek treatment or take any medication is apparently beyond the ability of many democracies to handle. Libertarian philosophies about the mentally ill appears to be the fallback position of most people and politicians of democracies - at least, until murders, arsons, and assaults occur, hurting many innocents (including the mentally ill person involved) and causing our prisons to be overcrowded. Punishment solutions for dangerous behaviors caused by mental illness is without question stupidly useless in solving anyone’s mental illness and stopping the behaviors. Worst of all, some causes of mental illness are not treatable or are imperfectly treatable. Some mentally ill people are fricking dangerous people. Full stop.
Mental illness is scary and embarrassing to all concerned, frankly, imho. I know writing this out loud is not politically correct, but I certainly feel it, think it, and say it. But that doesn’t mean it might be without solutions because for most of us, being mentally unbalanced is temporary, sometimes mild, almost always fixable through time, drugs, friends and family, and therapy if it is affordable. But sometimes there are painful decisions to be made, changing one’s job to a less stressful one that pays less, or dropping out of college, getting a divorce or breaking up with someone who is toxic but whom you love, etc. This unexpected event of a sudden temporary, or seemingly uncontrollable chronic, mental illness getting in one’s way isn’t a small thing at all. It is often a terrible change of future expectations, of what one planned or worked for. But the return to mental health or stability can be achieved in most cases with care, drugs, and changes.
However, what if the mental illness is not curable and consistently manageable? The pain and the loss of one’s dreams, of becoming the best one can be or do, are enormously difficult to face up to. The tragedy of a loved one’s chronic severe mental illness is not limited to the person suffering mental problems, either. The author mentions how one person’s mental problems ripple out to the family members, friends, admirers, employers, and neighbors.
The author weaves in how America has handled the mentally ill legally, historically and politically in researching the life story of Michael Lauder as the centerpiece of the book. Although Lauder and the author belong to the elite classes of intellectuals and the resource-privileged, clearly many of the highly educated or economically privileged are just as morally and spiritually challenged and confused as regular folk are by mental illness. I highly recommend reading ‘The Best Minds’.
There are an Index, and Notes sections, as well as extensive acknowledgements. There are a lot of famous people name-dropped in the story because that is the milieu where these people lived and worked. I was amazed at how small of a world the author and Michael Lauder moved in, these famous people and the supposedly regular people of the educated elite.
I had never heard of this particular case of murder, but I guess it was on the front pages of all of the mainstream papers. What I do know is that the book struck close to home for me too. I am not from the east coast of America, nor am I a member of the intelligentsia class. But having had mental illness in my family, and in growing up in the period of time discussed in the book about when President Reagan closed down most of the hospitals for the mentally ill after promising to provide aid for group homes for them, which he and Congress never did, resulting in astronomical numbers of family tragedies and many murders by mentally unstable family members, I couldn’t put the book down. While I lived through the period of time the author discusses, I had not known a lot of the political history of why the mental health clinics that had been open in every district of Seattle for low-income people who needed a psychiatrist suddenly all closed. I WAS aware of the catastrophic results, not only of the murders written about in the newspapers of parents by their schizophrenic adult children who could not (and many of these mentally ill adults would not get help even if the resources had been available) get treatment or medication, but because of the huge increase of people living on the streets that were obviously and visibly linked to untreated mental illness.
That said, I must also say the vast majority of mentally ill people are not dangerous to others, other than being the cause of chaos and sadness their family members suffer. However, a subset of the mentally ill can be very very dangerous. In any case, all of society loses because of the lack of inexpensive psychiatric care or the not having of any available resources at all in many areas for the treatment of the mentally ill in America. Congress has often publicly whined for the purpose of polishing their image up in the media about the tragedies caused by untreated mental illness. Many politicians have made promises of helping the mentally ill by introducing many various bills for care of the mentally ill in Congress - which they never fund, even when they pass the bill authorizing care. The only place which has reliably housed the mentally ill, but still not helping with psychiatric care, is our prisons. Study after study by different groups for decades keeps coming up with the figure of 80% of the people incarcerated suffer from some sort of mental illness. Much of this and more is discussed in the book.
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
“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 news 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.”
I am including links to some of the professional critics from many of the major newspapers who reviewed Rosen’s book. I hope they are not behind a paywall for you, gentle reader. I was able to read them, anyway.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/bo...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best...
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
There is a YouTube interview with the author :
https://youtu.be/2zAOYrInd30?si=68jlx...
This subject of what to do for and about the mentally ill makes me crazy, gentle reader, and I am only joking a little bit. Personally, I think we need to build and fund the clinics and the hospitals, and we need to implement involuntary commitment laws. The group homes which were intended to be established in the 1970’s should happen NOW.
I think everyone has experienced a time of being mentally unbalanced and needed help from something or someone. I don’t have any answers about the stigma of being mentally unbalanced whether temporary or mild, or chronic, or dangerous. The social stigma of mental illness is very real and often very destructive to one’s life. There are so many ways to be mentally ill, and each person needs individual assessment and individual treatment, with an experimenting of drugs to find the right one that works best for the involved individual if drugs are needed. I certainly can’t force politicians to understand that mental illness is, in my opinion, behind at least half of the social ills that cause disruption and tragedy we are all reading about every day in social media, which makes it a number one issue they should be addressing. Most worrying and often the most destructive of all, answering the question of what to do when someone is chronically mentally ill but that person refuses to seek treatment or take any medication is apparently beyond the ability of many democracies to handle. Libertarian philosophies about the mentally ill appears to be the fallback position of most people and politicians of democracies - at least, until murders, arsons, and assaults occur, hurting many innocents (including the mentally ill person involved) and causing our prisons to be overcrowded. Punishment solutions for dangerous behaviors caused by mental illness is without question stupidly useless in solving anyone’s mental illness and stopping the behaviors. Worst of all, some causes of mental illness are not treatable or are imperfectly treatable. Some mentally ill people are fricking dangerous people. Full stop.
Mental illness is scary and embarrassing to all concerned, frankly, imho. I know writing this out loud is not politically correct, but I certainly feel it, think it, and say it. But that doesn’t mean it might be without solutions because for most of us, being mentally unbalanced is temporary, sometimes mild, almost always fixable through time, drugs, friends and family, and therapy if it is affordable. But sometimes there are painful decisions to be made, changing one’s job to a less stressful one that pays less, or dropping out of college, getting a divorce or breaking up with someone who is toxic but whom you love, etc. This unexpected event of a sudden temporary, or seemingly uncontrollable chronic, mental illness getting in one’s way isn’t a small thing at all. It is often a terrible change of future expectations, of what one planned or worked for. But the return to mental health or stability can be achieved in most cases with care, drugs, and changes.
However, what if the mental illness is not curable and consistently manageable? The pain and the loss of one’s dreams, of becoming the best one can be or do, are enormously difficult to face up to. The tragedy of a loved one’s chronic severe mental illness is not limited to the person suffering mental problems, either. The author mentions how one person’s mental problems ripple out to the family members, friends, admirers, employers, and neighbors.
The author weaves in how America has handled the mentally ill legally, historically and politically in researching the life story of Michael Lauder as the centerpiece of the book. Although Lauder and the author belong to the elite classes of intellectuals and the resource-privileged, clearly many of the highly educated or economically privileged are just as morally and spiritually challenged and confused as regular folk are by mental illness. I highly recommend reading ‘The Best Minds’.
There are an Index, and Notes sections, as well as extensive acknowledgements. There are a lot of famous people name-dropped in the story because that is the milieu where these people lived and worked. I was amazed at how small of a world the author and Michael Lauder moved in, these famous people and the supposedly regular people of the educated elite.
July 17, 2023
I’m convinced Jonathan Rosen is one of the best minds I’ve read after reading this brilliant, insightful, critical, nuanced examination of the institutional and cultural and political factors that together culminated in the tragedy of Caroline’s death and Michael’s sentence.
This is truly one of the smartest books I’ve read about mental illness and its complexities. And beyond that, Rosen’s literary craft shines through his insights, descriptions, observations, honesty, humility, and style. In one portion of a sentence, a depth of understanding is captured succinctly and beautifully. The word that comes to mind when I think of Rosen’s work in general but esp here is “human”. Rosen’s writing captures so much of the human experience, incl envy, hubris, optimism, hope, suffering, grief, madness, confusion, disillusionment, and compassion. This is a masterpiece. It reminds me in some way of Capote’s gorgeous writing and human insights in In Cold Blood, but this book is more serious and expansive in what it tackles. This comprehensive research and exploration of all the contributing factors that led to this particular end is truly a labor of love. I anticipate this to be a foundational piece for mental health fields, incl public policy.
This is truly one of the smartest books I’ve read about mental illness and its complexities. And beyond that, Rosen’s literary craft shines through his insights, descriptions, observations, honesty, humility, and style. In one portion of a sentence, a depth of understanding is captured succinctly and beautifully. The word that comes to mind when I think of Rosen’s work in general but esp here is “human”. Rosen’s writing captures so much of the human experience, incl envy, hubris, optimism, hope, suffering, grief, madness, confusion, disillusionment, and compassion. This is a masterpiece. It reminds me in some way of Capote’s gorgeous writing and human insights in In Cold Blood, but this book is more serious and expansive in what it tackles. This comprehensive research and exploration of all the contributing factors that led to this particular end is truly a labor of love. I anticipate this to be a foundational piece for mental health fields, incl public policy.
January 11, 2024
Man, where to start. This author clearly has a very high opinion of himself. His long meandering attempt to name drop, expound to us his wisdom nay bard status in the telling of his upbringing shifts between victimhood to reeking of his ivy education. This windbag is the sort you’d find philosophizing himself at a boring upper class northeastern party of pretentious elitists too busy staring at themselves in the mirror to notice anyone else.
I can just see in my minds eye him writing a sentence and stopping to pat himself on the back. As prior reviewers have said he drones on and on trying to “wow” the reader with fact after fact and event after event of the years covered.
If you desire a story about the psycho or “crazy” killer, there are many better choices.
And the author comes off as the colleague so desperate to appear smart that they push too hard. In other words, grey energy.
I can just see in my minds eye him writing a sentence and stopping to pat himself on the back. As prior reviewers have said he drones on and on trying to “wow” the reader with fact after fact and event after event of the years covered.
If you desire a story about the psycho or “crazy” killer, there are many better choices.
And the author comes off as the colleague so desperate to appear smart that they push too hard. In other words, grey energy.
December 6, 2023
Named by the NYT as one of the best 10 books of 2023, The Best Minds is a memoir and work of non-fiction on the author’s friendship with Michael Laudor and on mental illness.
Rosen and Laudor grew up as two Jewish boys together in New Rochelle, a community of intellectuals north of New York. Rosen was the son of a professor and Holocaust survivor; Laudor had a similar background. Both boys were highly intelligent, precocious and competitive, with Laudor seemingly always having the edge - Rosen was the Carraway to Laudor’s Gatsby - until a slide into paranoid delusions and schizophrenia halted Laudor’s academic career.
After an extended stay in a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, Laudor (against all the odds) resumed his studies and took up a place in Yale Law School where he was protected and nurtured, and beginning to flourish, until a devastating crime brought everything to a sudden stop.
The book explores in much detail mental illness and the treatment of the mentally ill by successive US governments since the 1960s, in particular the “deinstitutionalisation” of mental illness - in other words, the moving away from incarceration of the mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals to the promise of community care, which never actually materialised and left those in need of care unable to access it. Leftwing idealism meets rightwing economics and the mentally ill fall through the crack in-between.
It also delves into the fashionable views of the 1960s which saw schizophrenia as a social construct, a reaction to the sickness of a capitalist society, as opposed to a genuine, genetic, psychiatric illness.
It’s a fascinating and well-written book, if a little long in parts, moving off on tangents that aren’t wholly relevant. Laudor was immensely privileged - I didn’t feel that this was truly acknowledged by the author or by Laudor - and Laudor’s privilege appeared to lend his family and those around him a misplaced belief (some might say, arrogance) that he could overcome without ongoing psychiatric intervention.
There are no easy solutions offered in the book but it’s an excellent, thought-provoking read on how the West deals with mental illness. If you enjoyed Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, you might also enjoy this one. 4/5⭐️
*Many thanks to the author and publisher @penguinbooksuk for the arc via @netgalley. As always this is an honest review.
Rosen and Laudor grew up as two Jewish boys together in New Rochelle, a community of intellectuals north of New York. Rosen was the son of a professor and Holocaust survivor; Laudor had a similar background. Both boys were highly intelligent, precocious and competitive, with Laudor seemingly always having the edge - Rosen was the Carraway to Laudor’s Gatsby - until a slide into paranoid delusions and schizophrenia halted Laudor’s academic career.
After an extended stay in a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, Laudor (against all the odds) resumed his studies and took up a place in Yale Law School where he was protected and nurtured, and beginning to flourish, until a devastating crime brought everything to a sudden stop.
The book explores in much detail mental illness and the treatment of the mentally ill by successive US governments since the 1960s, in particular the “deinstitutionalisation” of mental illness - in other words, the moving away from incarceration of the mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals to the promise of community care, which never actually materialised and left those in need of care unable to access it. Leftwing idealism meets rightwing economics and the mentally ill fall through the crack in-between.
It also delves into the fashionable views of the 1960s which saw schizophrenia as a social construct, a reaction to the sickness of a capitalist society, as opposed to a genuine, genetic, psychiatric illness.
It’s a fascinating and well-written book, if a little long in parts, moving off on tangents that aren’t wholly relevant. Laudor was immensely privileged - I didn’t feel that this was truly acknowledged by the author or by Laudor - and Laudor’s privilege appeared to lend his family and those around him a misplaced belief (some might say, arrogance) that he could overcome without ongoing psychiatric intervention.
There are no easy solutions offered in the book but it’s an excellent, thought-provoking read on how the West deals with mental illness. If you enjoyed Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, you might also enjoy this one. 4/5⭐️
*Many thanks to the author and publisher @penguinbooksuk for the arc via @netgalley. As always this is an honest review.
July 2, 2023
Once again, a book about mental illness that is well received and well reviewed but that I flat out did not like. Reviews describe it as examining the nature of madness but all that it examines is one man, Michael, who has an exceptional intellect and who also has schizophrenia; his outcome and course of illness is unlike the average person with psychotic illness and not one generalizable conclusion can be drawn from this example. If you are looking for a better book on this subject, check out Elyn Saks' book The Center Cannot Hold.
The other aspect of this book that I find annoying is that there is nothing said about treatment. The treatment for schizophrenia has changed substantially since the time described in Hidden Valley Road. The prospect for living without hallucinations is better than it has ever been, but it does require that the patient be compliant with medications and the overall treatment plan, and that often involves the psychotic persons family and friends. Schizophrenia is not an illness that is easily navigable alone, and there is little if any information on that aspect of Michael's life.
Then finally, this book perpetuates the myth that people with schizophrenia are violent. After every mass shooting there is an outcry that we need more mental health resources. That is certainly the case, but irrelevant to the situation at hand. No amount of mental health resources will prevent mass shootings until the access to guns is limited. To be helped by a mental health professional you have to want to be helped, and it requires a lot of work on the part of the patient who wants to kill people to get better, and that describes very few of the men who take an assault weapon into a public place. It is true that some people with schizophrenia are violent, but the numbers are few, and no greater than what is seen in the population as a whole. Unfortunately, the public perception of the prevalence of this and the reality are miles apart, and this book pours gasoline on that fallacy.
I wish it were written more as a memoir and less as an analysis of what happened and what went wrong. As it stands, I cannot recommend it, although it is well written, I will give it that.
The other aspect of this book that I find annoying is that there is nothing said about treatment. The treatment for schizophrenia has changed substantially since the time described in Hidden Valley Road. The prospect for living without hallucinations is better than it has ever been, but it does require that the patient be compliant with medications and the overall treatment plan, and that often involves the psychotic persons family and friends. Schizophrenia is not an illness that is easily navigable alone, and there is little if any information on that aspect of Michael's life.
Then finally, this book perpetuates the myth that people with schizophrenia are violent. After every mass shooting there is an outcry that we need more mental health resources. That is certainly the case, but irrelevant to the situation at hand. No amount of mental health resources will prevent mass shootings until the access to guns is limited. To be helped by a mental health professional you have to want to be helped, and it requires a lot of work on the part of the patient who wants to kill people to get better, and that describes very few of the men who take an assault weapon into a public place. It is true that some people with schizophrenia are violent, but the numbers are few, and no greater than what is seen in the population as a whole. Unfortunately, the public perception of the prevalence of this and the reality are miles apart, and this book pours gasoline on that fallacy.
I wish it were written more as a memoir and less as an analysis of what happened and what went wrong. As it stands, I cannot recommend it, although it is well written, I will give it that.
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