Paperback

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosens riveting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend 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 Mindsexplores the ways in which we understandand fail to understandmental 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 wasnt as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still battling delusions when he traded his halfway house for Yale Law School. Featured inThe New York Timesas a role model genius, he solda 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 Mindsis Jonathan Rosens brilliant and heartbreaking account of good intentions and tragic outcomes whose significance will echo widely.