The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

by Jonathan Rosen

Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor, Yale classmates and childhood friends, were inseparable for years. But in the midst of a high-flying career, Michael developed paranoid schizophrenia and later—in the grip of delusion—stabbed his girlfriend to death. He has been in a high-security psychiatric unit ever since. Rosen’s memoir of his friendship with Laudor is “heart-rending,” says the Guardian: “a rich and deeply thoughtful book about the nature of madness and the way that western society deals with it.”