Remarkable ... Rosen’s own memoir is the opposite of ruinous. It’s an inch-by-inch, pin-you-to-the-sofa reconstruction of his long friendship with Michael Laudor ... 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 ... Brave and nuanced.
The Best Minds is Rosen’s masterful attempt to reconcile what happened to Michael, Carrie and their families and friends, and how — or if — their story might have gone another direction. More than half a century later, Rosen looks squarely at his friendship and the ways in which a culture that reveres intellectual achievement can blind itself to the limitations of that same person’s mind ... 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.
Excruciating, riveting ... Rosen doesn't write this book... as a lurid expose but as a thoughtful examination of his friend's descent ... The Best Minds is an absorbing story of one man's tragic life.
A memoir of a boyhood friendship, a passionate critique of the failure of American mental health policy and a devastating story of human tragedy in which missed signals and intellectual complicity caused even the best minds to minimize the risks of severe mental illness ... This artful, reflective and even entertaining book – one of the best of this or any year – is his 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.
Heart-rending ... The path of their friendship through competing academic ambitions, awkward teenage flirtations and bruising moments of disloyalty is memorably captured in nuanced prose. Almost every page is filled with poignant observations, subtle ironies and a commentary pregnant with the unbearable weight of future knowledge.
Dazzling ... This lands as both a breathtaking and tragic portrait of a man with vast potential and a reckoning on how schizophrenia is treated and understood. This is a tough one to forget.
Rosen captures many worlds in this attentive, nuanced narrative ... An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae.
