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
Jonathan Rosen, author in conversation with Carrie Bearden, PhD, Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Psychology, and the Brain Research Institute at UCLA.
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 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 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.
Jonathan Rosen Bio:
In addition to The Best Minds, Jonathan Rosen is the author of two novels: Eve’s Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning, and two other works of non-fiction: The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds and The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature. His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous anthologies. He lives with his family in New York City.
Carrie E. Bearden, PhD, is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Psychology, and the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. Her research focuses on identifying underlying genetic and biological vulnerability markers for serious mental illness, using converging methodologies to study clinical high-risk samples and highly penetrant ‘genetic subtypes’ of these conditions. She joined the UCLA faculty in 2003 and then obtained a K23 Career Development Award to obtain specialized training in genetic methodologies. She is the Director of the UCLA Center for the Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States (CAPPS) and the Adolescent Serious Mental Illness internship and externship tracks for clinical students. With Roel Ophoff, she also co-directs the Neurogenetics T32 Predoctoral Training Program and the Neurogenetics track within the Neuroscience Interdepartmental Ph.D. program.