New listening
Finished "Servo" (highly recommended). Will begin the audiobook of this tragic memoir from 2023 on my Monday walk. Gotta tackle something serious in paper soon as well. At the moment, my traditional reading is confined to gamebooks, "SFX" and "Retro Gamer" mag, and "Batman" comics.
Blurb:
A novelist’s gripping
investigation of the forces that led his childhood best friend from academic
stardom to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman
he loved
When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen
and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys
were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale
University.
Michael blazed through Yale in three years,
graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then, one
day, Jonathan received a devastating call: Michael had suffered a psychotic
break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still
in hospital when he learned he’d been accepted into law school, and living in a
halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enrol. Still battling
delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured
in The New York Times, sold a memoir
for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael
and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star.
But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made
him a front-page story of an entirely different sort.
The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen’s powerful account of an
American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that
coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about
the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity.
Tender, funny and harrowing by turns, The
Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an
indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.
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