Summary of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good

Summary of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good

Author: GP SUMMARY

Publisher: BookRix

Published: 2023-04-22

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 3755439999

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DISCLAIMER This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book. Summary of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET: Chapter astute outline of the main contents. Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis. Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds is a story about his 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. It explores the ways in which we understand and fail to understand mental illness, and the bonds of family, friendship, and community. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community, the promise of intellectual achievement, and the lure of utopian solutions.


The Best Minds

The Best Minds

Author: Jonathan Rosen

Publisher: Penguin Group

Published: 2024-04-16

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 014313289X

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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 “Brave and nuanced . . . an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.” —The New York Times “Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.” —The 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. 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.


Eve's Apple

Eve's Apple

Author: Jonathan Rosen

Publisher: Picador

Published: 2010-10-12

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1429956240

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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.


The Life of the Skies

The Life of the Skies

Author: Jonathan Rosen

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-02-19

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780374186302

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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 Upright Thinkers

The Upright Thinkers

Author: Leonard Mlodinow

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0345804430

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How did a near-extinct species, eking out a meager existence with stone axes, become the dominant power on earth, able to harness a knowledge of nature ranging from tiny atoms to the vast structures of the universe? Leonard Mlodinow takes us on an enthralling tour of the history of human progress, from our time on the African savannah through the invention of written language, all the way to modern quantum physics. Along the way, he explores the colorful personalities of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers, and traces the cultural conditions—and the elements of chance—that influenced scientific discovery. Deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author’s trademark humor and insight, The Upright Thinkers is a stunning tribute to humanity’s intellectual curiosity and an important book for any reader with an interest in the scientific issues of our day.


DISPLACED PERSONS

DISPLACED PERSONS

Author: Jonathan Rosen

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2009-07-24

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1440147345

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Miles Asher, a respected physician in the prime of his career, commits a critical error resulting in the sudden death of a patient and friend. His remorse, intensified by the ambiguous circumstances surrounding his father’s demise, begins to consume him, threatening both his career and family. Attempting to come to terms with his fallibility, Asher immerses himself in the story of Zigfrid Zantay, a dying patient, who, at one time, had been Asher’s mentor. As a child, during World War II, after the Nazis abducted his father, Zantay spent his youth imprisoned in Displaced Persons camps. Asher follows Zantay’s quest to discover the fate of his father, mirroring Asher’s own search, as they each seek to become liberated from their oppressive pasts. Instead, they uncover evidence of their fathers’ inexcusable crimes. In scenes that range from the charged intensity of a hospital emergency room, to a ravaged post-war Europe, to the bowels of Auschwitz, Displaced Persons follows these two untethered souls as they are forced to confront the stigma of intergenerational guilt and the need to persevere over their flawed legacies.


The Talmud and the Internet

The Talmud and the Internet

Author: Jonathan Rosen

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2001-10-01

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9780826455345

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Examining the contradictions of his inheritance as a modern American and a Jew, the author blends memoir, religious history, and literary reflection while exploring the parallel between a page of the Talmud and the home page of a Web site, and reflects on the contrasting deaths of his American and European grandmothers.


What You Must Think of Me

What You Must Think of Me

Author: Emily Ford

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-07-10

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0190463473

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We've all felt occasional pangs of shyness and self-consciousness, but for the 15 million Americans with social anxiety disorder, the fear of being scrutinized and criticized can reach disabling proportions. Such was the case for Emily Ford, who shares her firsthand experiences in these pages. Emily's true story of fear, struggle, and ultimate triumph is sure to resonate with other socially anxious teenagers and young adults. Emily's frank, often witty, sometimes poignant account of how she negotiated all the obstacles of social anxiety--and eventually overcame them with the help of therapy and hard work--makes for compelling reading. Yet this book is more than just a memoir. Emily's story is coupled with the latest medical and scientific information about the causes, diagnosis, treatment, and self-management of social anxiety disorder (or SAD). Readers will find a wealth of solid advice and genuine inspiration here. In engaging, accessible language--and with the help of psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz--she discusses what is known and not known about social anxiety disorder in adolescents. She outlines the various psychotherapies available for those with SAD and explains how to seek professional help, how to talk to family and friends about the illness, and how to handle difficult social situations. The result is both an absorbing story and a useful guide that will help to ease the isolation caused by SAD, encouraging young people to believe that, with commitment and hard work, they can overcome this illness. Part of the Adolescent Mental Health Initiative series of books written specifically for teens and young adults, What You Must Think of Me will also be a valuable resource for friends and family of those with SAD. It offers much-needed hope to young people, helping them to overcome this illness and lead healthy, productive lives.


After Long Silence

After Long Silence

Author: Helen Fremont

Publisher: Delta

Published: 2011-08-10

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0307804658

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“Fascinating . . . A tragic saga, but at the same time it often reads like a thriller filled with acts of extraordinary courage, descriptions of dangerous journeys and a series of secret identities.”—Chicago Tribune “To this day, I don't even know what my mother's real name is.” Helen Fremont was raised as a Roman Catholic. It wasn't until she was an adult, practicing law in Boston, that she discovered her parents were Jewish—Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In this powerful memoir, Helen Fremont delves into the secrets that held her family in a bond of silence for more than four decades, recounting with heartbreaking clarity a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the resonance of truth. Driven to uncover their roots, Fremont and her sister pieced together an astonishing story: of Siberian Gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. After Long Silence is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets. Praise for After Long Silence “Poignant . . . affecting . . . part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past.”—The New York Times Book Review “Riveting . . . painfully authentic . . . a poignant memoir, a labor of love for the parents she never really knew.”—The Boston Globe “Mesmerizing . . . Fremont has accomplished something that seems close to impossible. She has made a fresh and worthy contribution to the vast literature of the Holocaust.”—The Washington Post Book World


Whistleblower

Whistleblower

Author: Amy Block Joy

Publisher: Bay Tree Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780981957746

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Whistleblower is the nail-biting true story of what happens when someone with a lifelong habit of going along to get along is confronted with criminal activity she can't ignore. What seems a simple path to justice turns into a nightmare that leaves her without friends or allies and threatens to end an accomplished career. This is the stunning true account of one woman's resolve to tell the truth at any cost.