Steve Lopez Books

Steve Lopez
	New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists The Soloist A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music (paperback: Berkley Trade, 2008) (hardcover: Putnam Adult, 2008) Now a major motion picture “An intimate portrait of mental illness, of atrocious social neglect, and the struggle to resurrect a fallen prodigy.” -- Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down This is the true story of journalist Steve Lopez’s discovery of Nathaniel Ayers, a former classical bass student at Julliard, playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Deeply affected by the beauty of Ayers’s music, Lopez took it upon himself to change the prodigy’s life -- only to find that their relationship has had a profound change on his own life.
	In the Clear (paperback: No Exit Press, 2003) (hardcover: Harcourt, 2002) Albert LaRosa has spent his whole life just trying to get from yesterday to tomorrow. Born, raised, and now the sheriff of a small New Jersey island town, he was forced back to his hometown of Harbor Light after his shot at the big time as a cop in Philadelphia was destroyed by the events of one dark night. Twenty-five years and one marriage later, it looks as if life might finally give him a break. Albert is offered a job as chief of security at a new casino at a salary he has only dreamed of. Not that his dreams were ever very grand. Of course, not everyone in town is equally happy. Albert can live with the death threats. And the bombings. Even a dead body provides some professional excitement. He can take his father's tirades about selling out and he can cope with his girlfriend, Rickie, losing her business--at least he's always been a good friend to her son, Jack. What bothers him is that he might have to arrest one of them for murder. Lopez throws his irresistible characters into the whirlwind that threatens to destroy the increasingly fragile world of Harbor Light, and makes us care both for them and for what they tell us about getting from one day to the next. As Albert realizes, you can get to your future only by way of your past.
	The Sunday Macaroni Club A Novel (paperback: Penguin, 1995) (hardcover: Harcourt, 1997) "IT WAS ONLY since the slide down the East Coast, after the most private part of her life had become tabloid fodder in Boston, that Lisa Savitch found herself smoking before her morning run."
	Land of Giants Where No Good Deed Goes Unpunished (Camino Books, 1995) The best of Steve Lopez's Philadelphia Inquirer columns are now together in a wonderful book. Now you can share Steve's refreshingly candid views in one volume. See for yourself why his readers love him and his targets wish he were almost anywhere else. One of the guiding principles of the column for Steve Lopez is: "H. L. Mencken once described his mission as a journalist this way: 'Confort the afflicted, afflict the confortable.' Obviously, my goal hasn't been that noble, or even close to it. Sometimes the idea was just to tell a story, or have some fun. But the Mecken line has been something of a guiding principle for me. So has the idea that a column be a tool against ignorance and hyprocrisy, whether written from a street corner in Philadelphia, the halls of Congress, or a battlefield in Bosnia. Part of what a column should do, it seems to me, is hold people up to their potential. To remind them not just what it is, but what can be."
	Third and Indiana A Novel (paperback: Penguin, 1995) (hardcover Viking Adult, 1994) A searing look at despair, passion, and hope in the drug-infested Badlands of Philadelphia tells of Ofelia's desperate search for her missing 14-year-old son, Gabriel, who is at the mercy of a sadistic dealer.