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

 Hello my lovely readers!

This was another library book....and this was another disappointment. Man, I'm really hitting out on all my library reads. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
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 Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times , sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions.

MY THOUGHTS
I checked out this book because I thought it'd be in the same vein of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace but I was sadly mistaken.

This book was incredibly dull and seemed like the author wanted to show how smart he was by constantly going off on tangents and historically long descriptions of a minute detail.

Was this book supposed to be about Michael's life or is it the author's memoir with sprinkles of Michael's life and madness. It was more than 500 pages, which was absurd to me. If he were solely focused on Michael, the author could've knocked this out in 300 pages.