“An inch-by-inch, pin-you-to-the-sofa reconstruction of the author’s long friendship with Michael Laudor. … Rosen examines the porous line between brilliance and insanity, the complicated policy questions posed by deinstitutionalization and the ethical obligations of a community.” 
– NYT The 10 Best Books of 2023
 
“This searching memoir retraces their relationship, meditating on how separate fates intertwine and diverge. Right when Michael’s life seems to be improving, he murders his fiancée. For the author, the questions about his friend deepen, while the answers recede.” 
– Richard J. McNally, WSJ The 10 Best Books of 2023

“Rosen captures many worlds in this attentive, nuanced narrative, evoking boyhood discovery, the life of post-Shoah Jews in America, the rise of predatory capitalism, and the essential inability of one friend to comprehend fully the “delicate brain” of the other. It’s an undeniably tragic story, but Rosen also probes meaningfully into the nature of mental illness. Throughout, he is keenly sensitive, as when he writes of the perils of self-awareness, “The flip side of the idea that writing heals you, perhaps, was the fear that failing to tell your story, and fulfill your dreams, cast you into outer darkness.” An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae.”
– Kirkus

“The often-cited fine line between madness and genius lies at the heart of this powerfully affecting memoir in which US novelist and non-fiction writer Rosen tells the shattering story of how a diagnosis of schizophrenia led his childhood best friend Michael Laudor from the heights of academic stardom and a major film and publishing deal, to a psychiatric hospital, and eventually to commit a horrific crime. An “American tragedy” but one with universal relevance, it combines a tender and touching story of friendship with a brutal indictment of how we neglect the mentally ill in our society at our peril.” 
– The Bookseller

'A remarkable meditation on friendship, success, madness and violence that refuses to oversimplify … This is a magisterial work, as much a sociological study of late 20th-century America as it is a book about madness. It is also a book about childhood and friendship, the long shadow of the second world war and its unexpected intellectual legacy, about ambition and delusion and the danger of stories. Despite weighing in at more than 500 pages, the narrative scarcely drags thanks to Rosen’s style, which is easygoing, but spiced with moments of pin-sharp brilliance.’ 
– David Shariatmadari, Guardian

‘A beautifully written meditation on society's inability to cope with the problem of mental illness’ 
– Gal Beckerman, Atlantic

“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.” 
– Wall Street Journal

“Jonathan Rosen’s “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” takes its title from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and could end up as just as enduring a work of American writing. Expect to see it on “Best Of” lists, and plan to make space for its nearly 600 pages on your shelf. A memoir, a love letter, and a biblical tragedy all at once, it avoids easy answers but clings to difficult questions. A tale told with humility, it charts the path to hell by noting every good intention along the way.” 
– New York Sun

“Rosen cannot release Laudor, but he has rehabilitated and rehumanized him on the page while honoring his victim. “The Best Minds” is too a thoughtfully built, deeply sourced indictment of a society that prioritizes profit, quick fixes and happy endings over the long slog of care…Effectively taking over his friend’s unfinished project, braiding it with his own story of clinical anxiety as well as skeins of history, medicine, religion and true crime, the author has transcended childhood rivalry by twinning their stories, an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.” 
– The New York Times

“Haunting . . . Rosen tells this story with such a keen mix of compassion and eloquence we can’t help but hope there will be a twist that somehow saves everyone from the inevitably heartbreaking outcome . . . Throughout the book — which is part memoir, part manifesto — Rosen asks uncomfortable but crucial questions, some of them unanswerable, all of them compelling, and the result is an incisive but intimate tour de force that’s as much about Michael’s story as it is about the stories we tell as a culture — what we value, what we see, and what we do our best not to see even when it’s right in front of us . . . Masterful.” 
– The Washington Post

“The Best Minds is an engrossing, passionate and balanced book – both a plea for the humane management of a most misunderstood disease and a haunting account of a friendship that ended in tragedy.” 
– Spectator

“This artful, reflective and even entertaining book – one of the best of this or any year – is [Jonathan’s] powerful effort to take responsibility for changing minds, to persuade us of the danger of allowing compassion to obscure truth. The Best Minds manages to honour both.” 
– Times Literary Supplement

“This engrossing memoir centers on the author’s childhood friend Michael Laudor, who developed schizophrenia and, in his thirties, committed a horrific murder. The pair, both Jewish faculty brats with literary dreams, grew up on the same street in New York’s suburbs—parallels that haunt Rosen as Laudor’s brilliance edges into paranoia. Rosen thoughtfully interweaves this story with an account of changing attitudes toward mental illness. Laudor, before his crime, had become a poster boy for a Foucault-influenced intellectual culture that saw psychosis as a metaphor for liberation. Meanwhile, as Rosen notes, institutions for treating the mentally ill were being dismantled with no provision of adequate replacements.” 
– The New Yorker

“When Rosen visited his friend—who’s now 59 —they didn’t talk about the murder. ‘But I mentioned (Carrie’s) name the first time I visited,’ Rosen writes. ’”I’m so sorry about what happened with Carrie,” I said. To which (Laudor) responded that it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.’ They mostly talked about their childhood, ‘which seemed a neutral place he enjoyed remembering,’ Rosen writes. But even when it felt like he recognized his friend again, there was still the uncertainty and fear. When he hugged Laudor goodbye, ‘it was like putting my head in the mouth of an old and toothless lion,’ Rosen writes. ‘Softened by age but still capable of crushing me.’” 
– The New York Post