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
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2023-04-22
Genre: Study Aids
ISBN: 3755439999

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
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2024-04-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 014313289X

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
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010-10-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429956240

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.

DISPLACED PERSONS

DISPLACED PERSONS
Author: Jonathan Rosen
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2009-07-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1440147345

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 Life of the Skies

The Life of the Skies
Author: Jonathan Rosen
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2008-02-19
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780374186302

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 Talmud and the Internet

The Talmud and the Internet
Author: Jonathan Rosen
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2001-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780826455345

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.

The Upright Thinkers

The Upright Thinkers
Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-04-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0345804430

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.

The End of Nature

The End of Nature
Author: Bill McKibben
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2014-09-03
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0804153442

Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth's environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement. More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on Nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike.

Superstition: A Very Short Introduction

Superstition: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Stuart Vyse
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2020-01-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0192551310

Do you touch wood for luck, or avoid hotel rooms on floor thirteen? Would you cross the path of a black cat, or step under a ladder? Is breaking a mirror just an expensive waste of glass, or something rather more sinister? Despite the dominance of science in today's world, superstitious beliefs - both traditional and new - remain surprisingly popular. A recent survey of adults in the United States found that 33 percent believed that finding a penny was good luck, and 23 percent believed that the number seven was lucky. Where did these superstitions come from, and why do they persist today? This Very Short Introduction explores the nature and surprising history of superstition from antiquity to the present. For two millennia, superstition was a label derisively applied to foreign religions and unacceptable religious practices, and its primary purpose was used to separate groups and assert religious and social authority. After the Enlightenment, the superstition label was still used to define groups, but the new dividing line was between reason and unreason. Today, despite our apparent sophistication and technological advances, superstitious belief and behaviour remain widespread, and highly educated people are not immune. Stuart Vyse takes an exciting look at the varieties of popular superstitious beliefs today and the psychological reasons behind their continued existence, as well as the likely future course of superstition in our increasingly connected world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Joy Comes in the Morning

Joy Comes in the Morning
Author: Jonathan Rosen
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2005-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429956232

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.