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Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York's Greatest Hoarders (An Urban Historical)
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Product Description
Homer and Langley Collyer moved into their handsome brownstone in white, upper-class Harlem in 1909. By 1947, however, when the fire department had to carry Homer's body out of the house he hadn't left in twenty years, the neighborhood had degentrified, and their house was a fortress of junk: in an attempt to preserve the past, Homer and Langley held on to everything they touched.
The scandal of Homer's discovery, the story of his life, and the search for Langley, who was missing at the time, rocked the city; the story was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks. A quintessential New York story of quintessential New York characters.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #244428 in Books
- Published on: 2003-10-22
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 161 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
When 65-year-old Homer Collyer, blind and crippled by rheumatism, was found dead in his dilapidated, junk-filled Harlem brownstone in March 1947, the discovery made all of New York's newspapers, as did the subsequent hunt for his younger brother, Langley, whose body was finally located under piles of debris. In this slim volume, part of Bloomsbury's Urban Historicals series, Lidz, a memoirist (Unstrung Heroes) and senior writer at Sports Illustrated, examines the Collyer brothers' intriguing, baffling lives. The compulsive hermits came from a respected, well-to-do family and were educated at Columbia, Homer as a lawyer and Langley, who was a talented pianist, as an engineer. They became part of New York lore in August 1938, when the World-Telegram wrote about the pair and their once-fashionable house on Fifth Avenue and 128th Street, which was crammed full of pianos, other instruments, bicycles, chandeliers, clocks and thousands of newspapers, "strewn in yellowing drifts across the floor." In addition to deconstructing the brothers' descent into their own world of squalor and isolation, Lidz shares recollections of his Uncle Arthur, an eccentric hoarder who was a featured character in Unstrung Heroes. Arthur amassed everything from magazines and bus transfers to socks and shoelaces and lived "nested inside his walls of junk." "My junk was like a friend," says Uncle Arthur. "Sort of a freedom, it was. I'd saved it in my own way." These words help make sense of men like Uncle Arthur and the Collyers, whose stories Lidz captures vividly, with humor and compassion.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Franz Lidz is a Sports Illustrated senior writer, a New York Times film essayist, and the author of Unstrung Heroes: My Improbable Life with Four Impossible Uncles, which was made into a 1995 Disney feature film.
Customer Reviews
Loved Uncle Arthur Even More Than The Collyers
I'm a compulsive hoarder of sorts and picked this up because of a link to another book on the subject. I disagree quite strongly with the previous reviewer. I absolutely adored the few chapters on the author's Uncle Arthur and thought they provided great insight and immediacy to the story on the Collyer Brothers. Given the wealth of detail about the brothers in this fine book I don't understand how any careful reader could feel cheated. If anything, I'd love to know more about Uncle Arthur, who, by the way, is cited in the title of this book. So, his inclusion should not come as much of a surprise.
I Feel Cheated!
To much story about Uncle Arthur and not enough about the Collyer Brothers. This was a real disappointment, save your money and get it from the library.
Loved the story
If this book doesn't get you to clean out your basement, nothing will. A true story about a couple of hermits whose junk collection got the better of them.
