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

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.&nbsp;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 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&nbsp;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.&nbsp;In the hands of a writer of Jonathan Rosen's gifts and dedication, its significance will echo widely.

Biographies & Memoirs

ROSEN, JONATHAN

Arts & Literature

Penguin??Books

The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds

The Talmud and the Internet, in which Jonathan Rosen examines the contradictions of his inheritance as a modern American and a Jew, is a moving and exhilarating meditation on modern technology and ancient religious impulses. Blending memoir, religious history and literary reflection Rosen explores the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the homepage of a web site, and reflects on the contrasting lives and deaths of his American and European grandmothers.

The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

Computers & Technology

Networking & Cloud Computing

Picador

Joy Comes in the Morning: A Novel

Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradictions--a rabbi who craves goodness and surety while wrestling with her own desires and with the sorrow and pain she sees around her. Her life changes when she visits the hospital room of Henry Friedman, an older man who has attempted suicide. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust when he was a child, and all his life he's struggled with difficult questions. Deborah's encounter with Henry and his family draws her into a world of tragedy, frailty, love, and, finally, hope.

Literature & Fiction

United States

Ruth Simon is beautiful, smart, talented, and always hungry. As a teenager, she starved herself almost to death, and though outwardly healed, inwardly she remains dangerously obsessed with food. For Joseph Zimmerman, Ruth's tormented relationship with eating is a source of deep distress and erotic fascination. Driven by his love for Ruth, and haunted by his own secrets, Joseph sets out to unravel the mystery of hunger and denial. This gripping debut novel is a powerful exploration of appetite, love, and desire.

Eve's Apple: A Novel

We are all birdwatchers. Over cities and jungles and open plains, the sky is animated by the flight of birds, and their presence reminds us of the wild element of life on earth that can never be suppressed. In The Life of the Skies, Jonathan Rosen explores the significance of this timeless pursuit, chronicling his own birding adventures alongside those of John James Audubon, Teddy Rooseevelt, and others. In the process, he discovers the interconnections--literary, philosophical, sceintific, and spiritual--between life on the ground and life up above. Richly researched, lyrically written, The Life of the Skies is "a tribute to the natural world and man's place in it" (Bloomberg News).

The Life Of The Skies

Literary

Picador Paper

Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradictions--a rabbi who craves goodness and surety while wrestling with her own desires and with the sorrow and pain she sees around her. Her life changes when she visits the hospital room of Henry Friedman, an older man who has attempted suicide. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust when he was a child, and all his life he's struggled with difficult questions: Can happiness really come after such loss, or does the very wish profane the dead? Can religious promises ever bring peace? Deborah's encounter with Henry and his family draws her into a world of tragedy, frailty, love, and, finally, hope. The New Yorker called Rosen's first novel "An impressive debut--a highly original addition to the distinguished line of Jewish-American romances." He has fulfilled the promise of his first fiction in this contemporary story of classic scope, whose characters hunger for love, grapple with faith and doubt, and seek to bind themselves to something sacred in the midst of modern chaos.

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Aerial delights: A history of America as seen through the eyes of a bird-watcher John James Audubon arrived in America in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president, and lived long enough to see his friend Samuel Morse send a telegraphic message from his house in New York City in the 1840s. As a boy, Teddy Roosevelt learned taxidermy from a man who had sailed up the Missouri River with Audubon, and yet as president presided over America’s entry into the twentieth century, in which our ability to destroy ourselves and the natural world was no longer metaphorical. Roosevelt, an avid birder, was born a hunter and died a conservationist. Today, forty-six million Americans are bird-watchers. The Life of the Skies is a genre-bending journey into the meaning of a pursuit born out of the tangled history of industrialization and nature longing. Jonathan Rosen set out on a quest not merely to see birds but to fathom their centrality—historical and literary, spiritual and scientific—to a culture torn between the desire both to conquer and to conserve. Rosen argues that bird-watching is nothing less than the real national pastime—indeed it is more than that, because the field of play is the earth itself. We are the players and the spectators, and the outcome—since bird and watcher are intimately connected—is literally a matter of life and death.

The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature

Blending autobiographical musings, religious history, and literary reflection, the author of Eve's Apple explores the relationship between ancient religious tradition and modern technology as he reflects on the very different lives of his two grandmothers--one American, and one murdered by the Nazis--and examines the parallels between a page of the Talmud and the home page of a website. 50,000 first printing.

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Eve's Apple

Ruth Simon, a former anorexic, remains obsessed with food, an obsession that creates profound distress and erotic fascination for Joseph Zimmerman, who is blind to everything but his insatiable appetite for her

Plume

Random House Value Publishing

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Books by ROSEN, JONATHAN

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ROSEN, JONATHAN. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

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

The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

Joy Comes in the Morning: A Novel

Eve's Apple: A Novel

The Life Of The Skies

Joy Comes in the Morning: A Novel

The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature

The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds

Eve's Apple

Eve's Apple