The Scandinavia Book Group will meet at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 22 to discuss the nonfiction book "The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music" by Steve Lopez. This meeting is open to everyone!
Steve Lopez is a newspaper columnist who has worked in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and also with TIME magazine. Several years back, Lopez came upon an L.A. Skid Row denizen named Nathaniel Ayers who impressed him with his violin playing, despite the fact that his violin had only two strings. Sniffing a story, Lopez set out to learn more about his acquaintance and discovered that Ayers had been enrolled at Julliard more than 30 years earlier. Lopez's initial column on Ayers drew wide attention, and eventually spawned many more as Lopez gradually became intimately involved in his subject's past and future. "The Soloist" directly recounts this unusual, ultimately heartwarming tale, but not before the author takes readers on a harrowing journey through the tougher elements of both mental-health treatment and the lower depths of downtown L.A.
Lopez's writing is as propulsive as good fiction, and his central character is nothing if not a singularly fascinating gent prone to disjointed stream-of-consciousness outbursts as well as brief informative lectures on classical music. Yet for all of its positive-striding spirit, Lopez's book is rife with suspense, mainly because Ayers' complex personality problems emerge as all too real and, especially since he adamantly refuses meds, require unending patience on the part of those aiding his progress.
