Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez, author of The Soloist, the 2009-2010 Community Book in Common, speaks at Laxson Auditorium.

Tickets are $15 general/$30 for preferred seating plus pre-lecture reception at 6 p.m. at www.brownpapertickets.com or 800/838-3006. Visit www.uwkc.org for more information.

This month Farley's Book Club will be reading Steve Lopez's The Soloist.
We will be meeting one week later than usual. As usual, please meet in the back room of Farley's for stimulating discussion and light refreshments!

The Soloist is an inspiring story of music and friendship, as well as a compelling examination of homelessness, mental illness, public policy, and race in America. On the Same Page is a project of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

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, ... (more)until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. Over time, Lopez and Ayers form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers's life. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up.
Join us as Vroman's celebrates the release of the movie The Soloist, a major motion picture from Dreamworks based on Lopez' poignant and hopeful true story of friendship, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx.

When Lopez, an L.A. Times columnist, first saw Nathaniel Ayers in March 2005, he was intrigued. Dressed in grubby, soiled rags standing next to a shopping cart, the middle-aged man was playing Beethoven on a battered violin that looked as if it had been pulled from a dumpster. Lopez found it impossible ... (more)to walk away from this musical genius whose talent had been buried under years of untreated mental illness, and what originally started out as a simple column has become a moving story about second chances and the power of human connection & friendships.