What genre is the soloist?
The soloist is a combination of a biography for Nathaniel Ayers and an autobiography for Steve Lopez. This book is biographical in that it includes information about Nathanial's education, family life, musical training, and recounts his experiences with Steve Lopez. This is also an autobiographical piece, because it describes Steve Lopez's life as well. He describes his own career, education, family life, and experiences with Nathaniel Ayers. Essentially, Ayers has effected Lopez's life as much as Lopez has effected Ayers's life. For instance, in chapter 7 Lopez spends the night in the "Toy District", on the street, with Ayers. His descriptions of the rats, roaches, drug dealers, drug addicts, and prostitutes show how Nathaniel lives every single night. However, it still describes one night of Lopez's life.

What issues does the soloist explore?
By analyzing the particulars of his own experience with Nathaniel Ayers, Lopez explores many universal themes. For instance, Ayers is a homeless person. However, he's not he only homeless person in the world. His experiences with the risks of disease, violence, and many other tribulations are similar to people in every city in the world. By describing the inadequate care provided for the homeless in Los Angeles, Lopez is suggesting that all homeless people are inadequately cared for and efforts must be taken to help their situation.
Ayers is also Schizophrenic. People that suffer from Schizophrenia and other mental illnesses have problems and experiences that are similar to Ayers. Medication and treatments have failed to help Ayers with his problems and inovation in treatment for the Schizophrenic is necessarry (not only in Ayers case, but in many cases).
To address problems that apply to himself, Lopez mentions the risk of his career. It's scary for him and many others that a lot of newspaper readers are dying out and turning to the internet for news. Without readers, writers for the LA Times won't be able to make a living and will lose their jobs. This also applies to other newspapers, like the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. Both the Inquirer and the Daily News are facing bankruptcy and extreme measures are being taken to keep profits flowing.
Lopez addresses many important issues in the soloist.

Effectiveness of examples; grammar; validity of ideas