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

By GP SUMMARY

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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

 

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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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Apr 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755439998

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Summary of

The Best Minds

A

Summary of Jonathan Rosen’s book

A Story

of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

GP SUMMARY

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

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

All rights reserved.

Author: GP SUMMARY

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Editing, proofreading: GP SUMMARY

Other collaborators: GP SUMMARY

NOTE TO READERS

This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Jonathan Rosen’s Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer designed to enrich your reading experience.

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The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

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Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.

Part I

Part I

The House on Mereland Road

The narrator is going back fifty years to the time before their father graduated from Yale Law School. They are on a road racing backward out of a tragic sorrow, but they are on a short street in New Rochelle where two ten-year-old boys live. They are just illusions, but they are also real. The narrator is on a road racing backward out of a tragic sorrow.

THE SUITABLE PLAYMATE

The narrator moved to New Rochelle in 1973 to meet Michael Laudor, a boy with shaggy red-brown hair and large tinted aviator glasses. He was taller than the narrator and had a distinctive habit of launching himself up and forward with every step, earning him the nickname Toes. When the narrator learned he was also called Big, the shortest kid in class was called Small, and when they lined us up in height order, Big and Small were bookends. Michael was big through some combination of height, intelligence, posture, and willpower. Michael was taller and skinny than the narrator, but he seemed to enjoy taking up space.

He was socially effective through uncowed persistence and his self-confidence put the narrator at ease. Michael told the narrator his name and his name, Jon, and offered his opinion that if the former owners had thrown out the fish tank, it probably leaked. Ruth Laudor was a neighborly woman who came over to welcome them, but Michael's geniality and self-confidence were his own. Even then, he seemed like the ambassador of his own country. Michael showed the narrator a song by Tom Lehrer called New Math that was so simple that only a child could do it.

He never believed in the line separating children from adults, and the Tom Lehrer album was ten years old. Michael often seemed like someone who had lived a full span already and was just slumming it in childhood. Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School was so close that the narrator could wake up fifteen minutes before the bell and still get to class on time. Michael treated the schoolyard, which had outdoor basketball hoops, like an extension of his backyard. Michael was a guide who gave the narrator a tour of the Wykagyl shopping center, where they found a store called Big Top, an A&P, a pizza place, and a pet shop.

He also cut the narrator's father's hair and called him professor after overhearing him use the word epiglottis. Michael and Cynthia were both writers with an all-consuming devotion to literature, feminism, and the Holocaust. They talked on the phone every day and wrote long letters when they received each other's letters. Cynthia lived in New Rochelle's south end, which had been settled in the seventeenth century by Huguenots. Her dream house was in walking distance to the train station, the Long Island Sound, and a Victorian house in Sutton Manor.

However, her father objected due to the lack of Jewish ambiance. The north end of New Rochelle was home to Rob Petrie, Carl Reiner, Jerry Bock and Joe Stein, and Fiddler on the Roof, a musical about a poor Jew who dreams of being a rich Jew. Jews had moved to New Rochelle to escape New York City, then moved to the north end to escape the troubled parts of New Rochelle. The big Conservative synagogue her father wanted them to join, Beth El, had relocated to the leafier north end and opened its new sanctuary in 1970. The narrator moved from Mereland Road to Mereland Road, a patchwork of old Irish and Italian working-class neighborhoods, fancy developments, integrated middle-class neighborhoods, a moribund Main Street, and a highway-fractured zone.

The narrator's neighborhood was called Wykagyl, a corruption of an Algonquin name used by the Lenape. The narrator's next-door neighbor, Mr. Fruhling, also said his w's like v's. Harry Gingold, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, lived one street over and gave out the honors at Beth El during Sabbath services. The narrator's father could pinpoint an accent and locate the sorrow behind it. Michael and the narrator were playing tabletop soccer in a coffee shop when their father divined the wartime history of a waitress.

Michael was fascinated by this display and imitated his father's accent. He also saw the neighborhood's survivors as an unseen collective of righteous protectors, with a mystical aura born of suffering that made them a bulwark against evil. The book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published the same year Michael and the narrator met, and Michael often had a basketball with him. Michael was a talented basketball player who often came to fetch the narrator for one-on-one or H-O-R-S-E, or simply to shoot around. He had a strong will to power over the ball and shot baskets in the rain and snow.

He often had books tucked under his arm, which he would dump unceremoniously at the base of the steel pole holding up the schoolyard basket nearest the stairs. He was a great summarizer of plots and situations, and it was the characters that were appealing. Doc Savage Jr. was a superman trained by his father to raise his son. He was the strongest, smartest, bravest, best-educated, and most dangerous man in the world. He used his surgical skills to perform a delicate brain operation on bad guys, eliminating their criminal inclinations and erasing all memory of their past evil.

Michael's mother kept a jar of bacon fat on the stove, and his father used stacks of books and car jacks to prop up his house, which was sinking like Venice. Michael was proud of his father's library, which was so vast that it was in The Guinness Book of World Records. His father often took them to the Barnes & Noble warehouse store on Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, where they were greeted by a round-breasted Indian dancer and a signature combination of odors. When they entered Michael's house, they were greeted by a round-breasted Indian dancer and a signature combination of odors. There were three contentious brothers, each bigger than the one before, who were always making a point.

Michael was the youngest of the Laudor family and was often butted off the bridge. He celebrated his brothers and his ability to survive them, and his mother, Ruth, sang in the house and laughed incongruously. His father, Chuck, was an intellectual who participated in the rough household energy. When playing Monopoly, the siblings wrote their names on items in the fridge, and someone was always shouting, That better be there when I come back! or Who drank my Dr Pepper? Michael was at the bottom of the food chain, but could still threaten to piss in the orange juice. He ate voluminously and at great speed, and was calmer when his house was empty.

He had all four grandparents, which gave him a geriatric aura. He would sometimes groan like an old Jewish man, a habit borrowed from his father's father, Max Lifshutz, who was born in Russia and ranked his days as one oy, two oy, or three oy. Michael's grandfather, Henry James Gediman, was an adman for William Randolph Hearst in the hegemonic heyday of print journalism. During the Great Depression, he met Hearst's Hollywood mistress, Marion Davies. Michael was grateful to his father for changing Lifshutz to Laudor before he was born, and his grandmother Frieda had schizophrenia. He was devoted to Max and Frieda, but was grateful to his father for changing Lifshutz to Laudor.

THE GOOD EARTH

Norman Rockwell was born in New York City and moved to New Rochelle as a teenager. He established his style and career in New Rochelle, found models for his paintings, bought a vacation cottage, a house and studio, and sent his son Jarvis to Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School. One morning, Michael emerged from his house wearing a fedora and carrying an old-fashioned cigarette holder. When it was his turn, he commandeered Miss Waldman's swivel chair and wore his jacket cape-like over his shoulders, doffed his fedora, and raised a hand. Michael was the most powerful man in the free world and declared war on December 7, 1941.

He was untroubled by the blank expressions of the class, and Miss Waldman told the class about the president who had overcome polio and saved the country. The narrator went to school dressed as their mother, and learned a lot walking around New Rochelle with Michael. The Wykagyl Country Club, a grand plantation-like building across the street from Roosevelt, was still restricted to no Blacks or Jews. The narrator sneaked onto the grounds in winter, but even pissing into the snow was a political act. Michael and his family lived in Wykagyl, New York, where the country club was still excluding Jews.

The stone church next to Roosevelt had become an Orthodox synagogue, while Michael's family belonged to the Reform temple. Michael's father was an economist who understood markets without ever managing to profit from them, while his mother would not have minded belonging to one of the beach clubs in the south end. Michael and his family lived in the modest section of Wykagyl and spent vacations hanging out in each other's houses. They felt sorry for kids who couldn't walk to the pizza place or pet store, but public transportation was the big two-hearted river of civilization. Ruth got an office job as soon as her kids were old enough to allow it, while her mother was writing and accepting Betty Friedan's argument that trapped housewives are more likely to raise autistic and schizophrenic children.

The Laudors had a Chevy Malibu, Plymouth Valiant, and Ford station wagon, and Chuck drove it like a Ferrari, swearing and swerving and keeping an eye out for cops. When they drove to the YMCA, Michael liked to draw his long legs up, circling his knees with his arms in mock preparation for impact. Chuck was capable of forgetting he'd put the car in reverse before pulling out of a spot, or looking behind him while lurching forward. The narrator's parents had both learned to drive as adults, but they canceled car trips due to snow, rain, fog, and darkness. They met at Bremer's house to play