Steve Lopez is a newspaper columnist somewhat in the mold of Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin. He’s worked in Philadelphia and Los Angeles – also with Time magazine – and has turned out a few novels. 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 instrument had only two strings. Sniffing a story, Lopez set out to learn more about his new acquaintance and discovered that Ayers had been enrolled at Juilliard 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.

It turns out that Ayers, after indeed spending two years at Juilliard as a promising string bass player, succumbed to a form of schizophrenia, thus disrupting his functionality, destroying his ability to continue in music school and eventually spiraling his life downward into the underclass. Encouraged by some of his concerned Los Angeles Times readers and also by cautious but supportive psychiatric professionals and social workers, Lopez forges a friendship with Ayers and for two years helps him get off the streets, pursue his music with renewed vigor, and take the huge emotional strides necessary to begin a modest re-entry into more conventional everyday living.

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 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. The Soloist is inspirational but also very gritty stuff; a film adaptation starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. is in the works.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

The writings of George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) engaged and electrified international audiences in the first half of the 20th century. In that, these British literary lions – each with decidedly different lifestyles – are similar. Writer David Lebedoff (Cleaning Up) uncovers deeper similarities in The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, a refreshing dual biography that compares and contrasts the lives and works of these authors, both of whom held the same (dim) views of totalitarianism, morality and the future of our modern world.

At a glance, the lives of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh seem no more alike than chalk is to cheese. Though both were born in 1903 England into the same social class, their paths diverged as they were educated, grew to manhood against a background of world war, and pursued their literary callings (meeting only once). During his boarding school days, the sensitive Orwell was cruelly bullied (torture he later chronicled in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”). Waugh had a brash lineage (his grandfather’s nickname was “The Brute”), and was a schoolboy bully who would later habitually torment both friend and foe alike. Orwell, a socialist and atheist, chose a hard life of near poverty. Waugh, a conservative and an ardent Catholic convert, was an unabashed social climber who courted the moneyed, aristocratic echelons of British society. Waugh lived into his 60s, gaining early success as a writer; Orwell’s writings remained fairly obscure until shortly before his death at age 46.

The conceit of examining opposites to excavate similarities has driven many classic tales, and it is employed with deft honesty here, despite Lebedoff’s effusive fondness for these authors. The Same Man is a first-rate read, an adroit portrait of two prescient thinkers who feared, with the steady upward and so-called progress of the Modern Age, our collective fall into “a bottomless abyss.” Enlivened by Lebedoff’s trenchant observations of the authors’ inner and outer worlds, it is pulled down slightly by the final chapter, which strays occasionally into unfocused conjecture irrelevant to this biography’s worthy premise.

Alison Hood plans to re-read Animal Farm and Brideshead Revisited before summer’s end.

The spirit that animates – or at least haunts – Deborah Baker’s excellent account of the Beats in India, A Blue Hand, is not the spirit of its main protagonist, the troubled, sweet-natured poet-mystic Allen Ginsberg, but rather an elusive seeker, chanter of Swinburne and one-time girlfriend of poet Gregory Corso, Hope Savage.

Ginsberg left New York for India in the fall of 1961, after months of delay and indecision, propelled by a vision of God he had in a Harlem apartment years earlier. He was met eventually by his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and the pair joined poet Gary Snyder and his then-wife Joanne Kyger for some weeks in exploring India, while Corso (the one truly unlikable figure in this history), remained ambivalently, fearfully at home, and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac followed other paths. Driven by unknown dreams or demons, Savage had long ago slipped the bonds of her eminent South Carolina family and of Corso and traveled by herself to Iran and Afghanistan. By the time Ginsberg arrived in India, she was already there.

Drawing with marvelous artistry from the papers and archives of Ginsberg and others, Baker presents readers with the manifold textures of the Beats’ inner quest – the dreams and nightmares, the drug use (which Ginsberg almost comically hoped would fast-track enlightenment), the personal and artistic rivalries, the poetry and the sometimes-numbing, sometimes-uplifting encounters with India itself. Baker, who was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for a biography of poet Laura Riding, wields here a scalpel-like pen: "Allen Ginsberg lay in a sweat-drenched puddle of self-pity," she writes early in the book. "He had so wanted to be a saint, but what was he supposed to suffer for?"

In May of 1963, Ginsberg headed home. According to Baker, "despite his passion for the idea of India, there was something improbable about Allen Ginsberg’s pilgrimage there. Unlike many of those who came after him, he neglected to leave much of his past behind. Instead, he brought most of it with him."

Savage, on the other hand, had cut her ties with the past and, it seems, absorbed the Eastern spiritual ideal of self-abnegation. Baker writes that she searched assiduously for Savage but never found her, not even a trace.

From 1929 to 1934, Florence Wolfson faithfully recorded the details of her life in a diary she received on her 14th birthday – and what a life it was. A precocious, exquisitely attired Manhattanite with an artistic bent, Florence took advantage of every opportunity for adventure, sometimes flirting with scandal. She frequented the Metropolitan Museum of Art, newly opened in 1929; saw live performances by actresses Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Lynn Fontaine and Eva La Gallienne. She had a copy of the banned Ulysses and read Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga novels as they were published. Among her classmates at Hunter College, where she edited the literary magazine, were Joy Davidman (whose marriage to C.S. Lewis was chronicled in Shadowlands) and Bel Kaufman, who recalled “a young woman who used to appear in class in fawn-colored riding breeches. . . . How I envied those riding breeches and the exotic life she lived.” That life is presented in cinematic scope in Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary.

Koppel, a New York Times reporter, came across Florence’s diary in 2003, when she happened upon a Dumpster loaded with old trunks, vintage clothing and other unclaimed items from the recesses of her building, where Florence had once lived. Intrigued, Koppel tracked her down with the help of a 1930s-fascinated lawyer-turned-detective.

Florence’s life reads like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime in places, with all the famous paths crossed and situations experienced; while descriptions of city life recall Marjorie Hart’s Summer at Tiffany. Together, Koppel and Florence take readers through a world dizzy with new ideas, rhythms and inventions, but not immune to the effects of the Depression and later the coming of world war.

In fleshing out the creator of Roget’s Thesaurus, writer Joshua Kendall faces something of a dramatic and structural problem: How does one enliven and sustain interest in a man who didn’t make his major intellectual contribution until he was 73 years old? The man in question is Peter Mark Roget, a physician by training and a wordsmith by choice. Kendall ties his chronicle together by demonstrating that Roget (1779-1869) was obsessed with classifying and list-making from early childhood onward. These habits of mind proved crucial when he finally decided the time had come to compile and publish his exhaustive list of English synonyms and their opposites (the term"antonym" was yet to be coined).

Roget’s life was not particularly exciting – even to him. True, he had a smothering, self-centered mother who eventually went mad, a rich and politically prominent uncle who committed suicide and a harrowing escape from French-held territory in 1803 after Napoleon resumed his war with Britain. But there were long periods during which Roget pursued his career only desultorily, seemingly indifferent to the cause that would ultimately immortalize him.

To compensate for the lack of intrinsic drama, Kendall amasses details of places and personalities that were significant to Roget, frequently drawing on tangential and recently discovered sources. Uneven as his personal life was, it is clear that Roget was unwavering in his fascination with science. He wrote and delivered papers on subjects ranging from anatomy to optics to improving the slide rule. Roget completed the first draft of his "Collection of English Synonyms classified and arranged" in 1805, but he did not publish it – and then in a much expanded form – until 1852.

In his epilogue, the author explains how Roget’s Thesaurus has survived as a reference book and valuable literary property (selling almost 40 million copies) despite the advent of online parallels and a withering criticism from author Simon Winchester, who maintained that the work made possible, and thus encouraged, an indiscriminate attitude toward word choices and writing style. Kendall correctly notes that this judgment demands too much from the book and too little from its users.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) considered himself a man of three lives: one as an ethnic Pole born in the Ukraine who lived the early part of his life in what is now Poland; one as a widely traveled seaman; and another as a writer in England. A master of reinventing himself, Conrad occasionally applied his fiction-writing skills to autobiography. To further complicate matters, some of those close to him gave inaccurate accounts of his life. John Stape, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad and co-editor of two volumes of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, is the ideal biographer for such a complex subject. An intrepid researcher, Stape debunks some Conradian myths in his latest book, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad.

An orphan by his teens, Conrad decided to go to sea, inspired by sea novels and youthful rebellion. During this period he read widely and developed two defining lifelong characteristics: acute observation skills and a habit of living beyond his means. Of particular interest are Stape’s exploration of Conrad’s travels as sources for his later novels and stories; for example, his 1890 trip to the Congo inspired his most famous tale, Heart of Darkness. As Stape writes, “His experience of the depths of rapacity, inhumanity, and cynicism was to alter his views of life forever, and his contact with the climate permanently damaged his health.” Stape deals with the related questions of why Conrad became a writer and why he decided to write in English (his third language after Polish and French), dismissing Conrad’s insistence that he just sat down one day and started to write. Though Conrad’s extraordinary talent was recognized by many in literary circles early in his career, it would be years before he gained a significant readership. Conrad’s relationships with publishers and his close friendships with Stephen Crane and John Galsworthy are also discussed.

This authoritative and insightful book should be appreciated by all who enjoy Conrad’s work, as well as readers who like good biography.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller.

Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Philip Fradkin (Stagecoach; A River No More) trains his literary eye on the physical, emotional and intellectual landscapes of iconic Western writer Wallace Stegner in a new biography, Wallace Stegner and the American West. A well-executed biography often utilizes a specific angle colloquial to its subject’s life and endeavors: Here Fradkin works a favorite Stegner literary device, synecdoche, as a pivotal conceit. The use of specific example to illustrate generality, synecdoche is employed while the biographer visualizes Stegner’s life as “the vista from which to gaze upon the panorama of the American West in the twentieth century.” This grand gesture has the remarkable effect of putting the panoply of the western frontier in the background; pushed forward is a meditative, focused homage to the vital synergy between man and place.

Wallace Stegner was born in Iowa in 1909, the son of “a wandering boomer” father and a mother who longed for domestic permanence. Of his childhood, the eminent novelist, teacher and conservationist stated: “I was born on wheels. I know the excitement of newness and the relief when responsibility has been left behind. But I also know the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness.” For Stegner, that hunger was a raw unease that birthed a lifelong, deep connection with place, a fusion that dominated his literary, academic and activist pursuits. Fradkin investigates the writer’s life from Stegner’s youthful days on a bleak Saskatchewan plain and in the more hospitable environs of Utah; as a groundbreaking Stanford professor; a controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (for Angle of Repose) and a man passionate about wilderness preservation.

Fradkin’s journalistic objectivity largely balances this work, however his emotional involvement with and respect for Stegner (though he met him only once) impart a glancing instability, resulting in an overlong defense against the accusations of plagiarism leveled at Stegner for Angle of Repose, and a slightly cloying epilogue. Overall, this is an engaging, holistic recounting of a rich, rough-and-tumble literary life, anchored in the rugged Western terrain, a fast-vanishing wilderness that Stegner would say we must preserve for our very sanity, a landscape crucial to our human “geography of hope.” Alison Hood writes from the urban wilderness of northern California.

Her name is famous in the art world, not as an artist, but as a lover of art and a noted collector and patron. It was Peggy Guggenheim who gave the unknown painter Jackson Pollock his first show. She was equally pivotal in the careers of greats like Mark Rothko and Max Ernst. Because she couldn’t afford works by the old masters, Guggenheim wisely concentrated on what she called "the art of one’s time." Pieces in her collection dating from the first half of the 20th century embrace Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Little wonder that the Peggy Guggenheim collection is today world-renowned.

How that collection came about, and Peggy’s metamorphosis from privileged Jazz Age baby to a doyenne of modern art, is recounted by historian Anton Gill in vivid detail in Art Lover. Peggy’s father, Benjamin, was the son of Meyer Guggenheim, whose family amassed its fortune during the industrial revolution. Peggy herself was just 13 when Benjamin died on the Titanic. He had not managed his money well. Though his widow and children would never want, neither would they live the lifestyle associated with the Guggenheim name.

Peggy was an unpaid clerk in an avant-garde bookstore when she first became enamored of those from the bohemian world of arts and letters. Especially the men. Though she was no beauty (her nose was a ringer for the snout on W.C. Fields), Peggy nonetheless managed to captivate. Doubtless, her allure had much to do with her sexual appetite. She would marry twice (once to Ernst) and take innumerable lovers. She would also have a lifelong love affair with Europe, including post-war Paris, where she hobnobbed with the Lost Generation’s artists and literati, and London, where she opened her first gallery. Later, Venice would become home and the site of her museum. A highlight of the Grand Canal, the gallery is her most enduring legacy.

Exhaustively researched and written with a special feel for the decades that so defined Peggy Guggenheim’s artistic journey, Art Lover tells all with a mix of scholarship and Žlan. And, like Peggy herself, the book never fails to fascinate. Pat Broeske writes from Santa Ana, California.