Cocktails & Conversation with Jonathan Rosen

It was a shocking and tragic event that made headlines across the country: A young man who had grown up in New Rochelle and overcome the challenge of being diagnosed with schizophrenia — graduating from Yale Law School and selling his life story to Hollywood — killed his pregnant fiancée. Twenty-five years later his childhood best friend has written The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, which The New York Times calls “an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.”  On Thursday, June 22^nd the New Rochelle Public Library Foundation invites you for Cocktails & Conversation with author Jonathan Rosen.

The Best Minds begins in New Rochelle when Jonathan and Michael meet as 10-year-olds. It is a story about friendship, guilt, competition, the mystery of identity, and the longing for happy endings that, in the words of Mayor Noam Bramson, “surely must be the best account ever written of growing up in New Rochelle.” It is also a far-ranging exploration of our legal, medical, and cultural responses to severe mental illness that Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac, calls “A moving evocation of childhood friendship that morphs into a devastating evocation of mental illness …a harrowing tour de force.”

Cocktails & Conversation will take place at Alvin & Friends Restaurant (14 Memorial Highway, New Rochelle) from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm. Tickets cost $60, and include delicious nibbles and two drinks; proceeds benefit the non-profit NRPL Foundation. Tickets are available at  http://weblink.donorperfect.com/httpweblinkdonorperfectcomRosen or by mail with a check payable to NRPLF sent to New Rochelle Public Library Foundation, 1 Library Plaza, New Rochelle, NY 10801. For more information visit the website at nrplfoundation.org.

Books will be available for sale and signing that evening via Bronx River Books  (37 Spencer Place, Scarsdale;  914-420-6396;  email info@bronxriverbooks.com; website www.bronxriverbooks.com/

Cocktails & Conversation is one of the NRPL Foundation’s signature events, designed to bring book lovers together. The evenings feature authors in a discussion moderated by Prof. Amy Bass, Ph.D., NRPL Foundation Board Member, historian and acclaimed author (One Goal: A Coach, A Team and the Game That Brought A Divided Town Together). 

The New Rochelle Public Library Foundation is a nonprofit organization that raises resources and provides advocacy to keep the library vibrant, up-to-date, and able to serve the diverse needs of the New Rochelle community. For more information about the NRPL Foundation visit the website at nrplfoundation.org