The Best Minds

Online

Both children of professors, they were best friends and fierce rivals who followed each other to Yale, which Michael Laudor blazed through in three years.

Then Jonathan Rosen received a devastating call: Michael was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, his law school graduation made the New York Times with film rights snapped up by Ron Howard. But then, in the grip of psychosis, he committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort. The novelist and The Talmud and the Internet author discusses The Best Minds, described by The Guardian as “Extraordinary...a remarkable meditation on friendship, success, madness and violence”. In conversation with clinical psychologist, author and Mortal Secrets writer Frank Tallis

Buy a copy of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen and buy a copy of Mortal Secrets by Frank Tallis

In Association with Lockdown University

Speaker biography

Jonathan Rosen

Jonathan Rosen is the author of two novels: Eve's Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning, and two non-fiction books: The Talmud and the Internet and The Life of the Skies. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and numerous anthologies. He lives with his family in New York City.

Image © Tali Rosen

Chair biography

Frank Tallis

Frank Tallis is a clinical psychologist and writer. The TV series Vienna Blood is based on his psychoanalytic detective novels. His latest non-fiction book is Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind

Book Week supporters

Dangoor Education
Eduard Shyfrin and Family
Genesis Foundation
Klein Family Foundation
The National Library of Israel
Pears Foundation
The Edith & Ferdinand Porjes Charitable Fund