Most Helpful Customer Reviews
69 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Strange, Moving, Wonderfully-Told Tale, December 14, 2003
This review is from: Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York's Greatest Hoarders (An Urban Historical) (Hardcover)
I've been fascinated by the story of the Collyer brothers for years, but had only found the most superficial accounts of their lives. Even as a youth, I was a budding hoarder (magazines, newspapers, Congressional Records, old phone books), and my mother told me about the Collyers and the 100-plus tons of junk that was found inside their Harlem brownstone after their deaths in 1947. It was clearly a cautionary tale and it worked, to a degree.
But who were these men? What led Homer and Langley Collyer to entomb themselves in a crypt of their own making? Franz Lidz tells their story with a great sense of compassion and understanding. His sympathetic treatment of the Collyers in large part stems for his affection for his own Uncle Arthur, also an eccentric hoarder, if on a much lesser scale. Chapters about the Collyers alternate with Uncle Arthur's story; the reader is left with not just a better understanding of the mysteries of the collecting impulse, but of that mysterious, wonderful power we call love.--William C. Hall
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
HARLEM'S HOARDING HERMITS..., October 9, 2004
This review is from: Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York's Greatest Hoarders (An Urban Historical) (Hardcover)
Ever since I read "My Brother's Keeper", a wonderful book by Marcia Davenport, which was a novel loosely based upon of the lives of the notorious Collyer brothers, I have been interested in reading more about these strange men who hoarded junk in their Harlem brownstone home. Having grown up the well-educated children of privilege, it is odd that Homer and Langley Collyer should have each led so ignominious an existence, sad relics of what might have been. They both ended up dying in their junk laden, squalid home, which was filled from top to bottom with old newspapers and the detritus of others, as well as their own.
When I came across this book, I was delighted, as it gives the reader a birds-eye view into the life that the Collyer brothers led. Since the facts known about their lives are somewhat limited, as they were, after all, hermits, the author intersperses the Collyer account with one closer to home, that of his own Uncle Arthur, who was also a hoarder. The author seamlessly weaves these two stories of hoarders and their lives into a book that is highly entertaining. It is at once both poignant and humorous.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good things can also come in small packages, December 16, 2003
This review is from: Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York's Greatest Hoarders (An Urban Historical) (Hardcover)
In 1991, Franz Lidz published Unstrung Heroes, a bittersweet account of his childhood with four eccentric uncles. Here we met Uncle Arthur, a confirmed bachelor whose chief distinction was a passion for collecting junk. Uncle Arthur's acquisitive side had turned his New York apartment into an obstacle course of landsliding odds and ends. But as Lidz discovered, Arthur's habit was overshadowed by the Collyer brothers, a couple of siblings whose clutter-clogged Harlem brownstone became the stuff of legend in 1947. That's when police discovered the aged Homer Collyer's body at his Harlem residence - a home so crowded with sheet music, mantel clocks, musical instruments, empty bottles, ratty furniture, discarded clothing and assorted refuse that it took police hours to remove the corpse. But where was Langley, Homer's equally odd brother? The mystery inspired a manhunt that gripped New York for days, as the city's tabloids camped at the Collyer house and regaled readers with accounts of the Collyers' peculiar existence. Juxtaposing period accounts of the Collyers against his personal experiences with Uncle Arthur, Lidz recreates the saga of the Collyers and uses its lessons in dealing with his own family's eccentricities. The title of Ghosty Men comes from a neighborhood nickname used to describe the Collyers' spectral appearance. But Lidz sees the Collyers as flesh-and-blood characters, part of a broader pack rat tradition that has its own form of interior logic. Lidz's muse throughout the book is Helen Worden, a now-forgotten journalist who covered the original story of Homer Collyer's demise. Taking a cue from Worden, Lidz lets the story of the Collyers stand on its own, largely avoiding the current fashion for pop psychology. There's a brief passage citing speculation that the Collyers' oddball behavior was caused by - surprise - their mother, but this isn't a clinical expose in the vein of Oliver Sacks. Instead, Lidz focuses on the more basic but no less challenging job of taking a story and telling it well. The modesty of his mission gives Ghosty Men an appropriately modest scale. A small book of 161 pages, its reads like an extended magazine article, absorbing but compact. As the Christmas season gets underway, the bookstore shelves will swell with mammoth volumes marketed as 10-pound gifts. Amid this heavy lifting, Ghosty Men promises to remind readers that good things can also come in small packages.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
