Hear the Heart Strings of Humanity

books:


	• The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music Steve Lopez Putnam Adult, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hear the Heart Strings of Humanity

Steve Lopez writes an eloquent, very personal story of a homeless, mentally ill man with a brilliant, talented past. It is totally by chance that Lopez meets Nathaniel Ayers along Skid Row in downtown LA. Captivated by the music Nathaniel plays on a beat-up violin that is missing two essential strings, Lopez steps over the threshold into a world very unlike his own.
As a reporter, Lopez's style is rich, tactile and complete. We follow Nathaniel's trail of breadcrumbs from humble beginnings in Cleveland to Julliard to the tunnel in LA where he sleeps.
Lopez's visually evocative language creates a spell that shows us how the mentally ill are marginalized and along with him, we ride the magic carpet of great hopes for recovery and change and then plummet into the depths of Nathaniel's delusional brain chemical mania.
All the while, Lopez allows us to experience his personal emotional struggle of managing a reporter's tettering job, a wife, a two year old daughter and his commitment to helping Nathaniel, once a musical prodigy, now brought down by schizophrenia.
Poignant and touching, this book is a true story of people so real, you will wake from the page with music in your ears and in your heart.

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the soloist

Great story line. Towards the end, I began to read slower, then pick the book down for a few days, because I did not the story to end. I think this fall around October, November the movies based off this book is scheduled to come out, Starring Jamie Fox. Might not be a bad idae to pick this box up and read it before the movie comes.

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What the movie won't do

"The book was better." Moviegoers are always saying that.
Back in 2005, *Los Angeles Times* columnist Steve Lopez wrote a series of stories about a homeless man who turned out to possess orchestra-level talent on several stringed instruments.
Lopez turned his columns into *The Soloist* -- and now it's being turned into a movie (an early Oscar contender, no less, to be released Nov. 21) starring Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, the musician who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
So why not just wait for the movie? Downey Jr. is a great actor, and Foxx, having played another gifted-but-disabled musician in Ray, just might pull off the mix of inspiration and delusion.
Because books provide detailed, verbal pleasure, that's why. In real life, fore example, Lopez is married and very much involved in the life of his young daughter; in the movie, he's divorced. OK, so screenwriter Susannah Grant (*Erin Brockovich*) needed to streamline the narrative.
But scenes recorded for the movie won't capture the author's commentary. Movie directors can compel our focus, but they can't enter into the characters' interpretations. At one point, for example, Lopez decides to spend a night on the streets as a homeless person alongside Ayers, who demonstrates how he taps a stick on the sidewalk at night to scare off rodents. And Lopez observes: "He's a classical musician who has taken a great fall and now finds himself fending off sewer rats, but when I look into his eyes, I find no hint of regret, no recognition of this nightly collision between beautiful thoughts and ugly reality."
Most important, the process of reading through the months and months of coordination it took among several people to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment (tentatively, provisionally) -- the reader's act of setting the book aside, then returning to it days later -- mimics the one-step-forward, three-steps-back hassles that Lopez endured just to make Ayers' life a little better. Movies accelerate problems, then "solve" them in two hours.
Director Joe Wright allowed us a glimpse, in *Atonement,* of a happily-ever-after ending that's severely undercut by stark realities. Reader-viewers of *The Soloist* will anticipate an ending that offers the hope of continued treatment for Ayers, not a cure. Lopez's book ends with the question of whether Ayers will be able to continue attending concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, let alone performing in them. No sentimentalized Hollywood endings are welcome here.
If they intrude, then this Thanksgiving, you can stroll out of a cineplex somewhere and justly say, "The book was better."

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Go for it

Having read each of the columns where Steve Lopez introduced us to Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, I wasn't surprised by most of the content of the book. Where I was pleasantly surprised was in Mr Lopez' admissions that he was unprepared for the depth of Mr Ayers' illness, and that he, at times, attempted to rush Mr Ayers' treatment. His growth ahd changes are unmistakable. Mr Lopez is to be commended for what he has done to bring awareness to mental health issues faced by many residents of LA, and specifically Mr Ayers.

I am a friend of the author

Steve Lopez has written a moving story of a talent musician and, in the process, written an illuminating two-year autobiography.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

A moving story of the remarkable bond between a journalist in search of a story and a homeless, classically trained musician?destined to be a major motion picture from DreamWorks, starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.

When Steve Lopez saw Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles? skid row, he found it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years earlier, Ayers had been a promising classical bass student at Juilliard?ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans?until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is homeless, paranoid, and deeply troubled, but glimmers of that brilliance are still there.

Over time, Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers?s life. Lopez collects donated violins, a cello, even a stand-up bass and a piano; he takes Ayers to Walt Disney Concert Hall and helps him move indoors. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up. In the process of trying to save Ayers, Lopez finds that his own life is changing, and his sense of what one man can accomplish in the lives of others begins to expand in new ways.

Poignant and ultimately hopeful, The Soloist is a beautifully told story of friendship and the redeeming power of music.

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