BOOK REVIEW: 'Soloist' examines human side of mental illness, friendships

Posted on December 18th by TheStarPress.com:

By Ivy Farguheson

If a friend or family member has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and you're at your wits end trying to figure out what to do for them, here's a suggestion. Read The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship and the Redemptive Power of Music by journalist Steve Lopez, and breathe.

Nathaniel Ayers is a homeless man Lopez sees playing the violin near his office at the Los Angeles Times. A regular columnist for the newspaper, he decides to talk to Ayers, in hopes of coming up with his latest column.

He then enters into the complex world of mental illness, homelessness and media responsibility, opening his eyes to his own narcissistic behaviors and the beauty of freedom and music.

Ayers suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, something readers and Lopez discover early on. Through continual conversations with him, Lopez discovers that he has an impressive musical knowledge and spent time in his 20s as a student at Julliard.

With each meeting, Lopez becomes more intrigued with the community services for the homeless in Los Angeles and the struggles of truly caring for someone with schizophrenia. He continues to write columns about what he discovers in his city, but begins to wonder if he is exploiting Ayers for his own celebrity.

The Soloist is an excellent book, not because of its subject matter or the author's writing style, but because of its raw honesty. Ayers is homeless and does not wish to take medication or stay in shelters. He prefers to stay on the street, playing his music, experiencing what he believes to be true freedom.

And Lopez is a middle-class professional with his own ideas about how life should be lived and what should be done to save those who need community services.

In this work, these two men show the power of friendship and its ability to change each of us in ways we are unaware of every day. Whether Ayers moves inside or begins to take his medication is not the point of this journey. Nor is the path Lopez takes to see how he is pushing his own ideas on someone with an illness unknown to him.

The message of living and learning from the world around us is the paramount lesson in this work. Similar to A Beautiful Mind, this work certainly opens readers' minds to those living with schizophrenia. But more importantly, it opens the hearts of those who judge others for various reasons.

The Soloist won't solve anyone's problems or answer those questioning the world of mental illness, but it will encourage readers to take a breath, slow down and love those who enter their lives.