Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor were best friends and keen competitors, enrolled in Yale University. Michael blazed through college in three years and landed a top-flight consulting job. But one day, Jonathan received the call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School. He not only managed to graduate, but his story was featured in The New York Times, and Ron Howard bought the film rights. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed his supportive girlfriend 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.