Rating: 
Summary: AS GRIPPING AS AN EDGAR ALLAN POE STORY
Review: A deep pleasure to read. This urban tale, full of strange characters and stranger truths, is adventurous, inquiring, observant, penetrating and splendidly iconoclastic. In a way, it is almost a sequel to the excellent Unstrung Heroes.
Rating: 
Summary: Fortress of solitude.
Review: Both funny and sad, "Ghosty Men" by Franz Lidz, a tragedy that reads like a comedy, is the extraordinary, moving story of the real-life predicament of Homer and Langley Collyer, the New York "Hermits of Harlem", recluses in their four storey brownstone house from 1929 (when their mother died) to 1947 - Homer never venturing out after losing his sight in 1934, Langley rarely emerging and then usually only after dark. Barricaded in their fortress of solitude, appalling pong everywhere, inches thick coating of dust over everything, surrounded by stockpiles of boxes, crates and stacks of yellowing newspaper (hoarded over decades) with a mazelike network of passages, living out a ghost-like existence in a void of dead and empty, meaningless time, the Collyers remained static in a time-warp year-upon-year, decades that saw Harlem transformed into a rundown black ghetto.Sensitive in his approach to the Collyers, affording them respect and dignity, Lidz cross-cuts in alternate chapters to his own eccentric Uncle Arthur, who like Langley Collyer, spent a lifetime amassing an astonishing assortment of junk, never passing up an opportunity to lift the lid of a dumpster. Uncle Arthur chapters contain hilarious moments, heartbreak and fascinating insights into old-time New York characters and a New York that is no longer - but for this reader, eager to get back to the Collyers, proved something of a sideshow distraction from the billed main feature. In 1938, following years of reclusive anonymity, the Collyers suddenly found themselves catapulted into the public arena, thrust into the harsh glare of the national media spotlight when the story of their bizarre existence was widely reported. Much later, when Homer was found dead in 1947 and word spread that Langley had disappeared, there followed an enormous explosion of ballyhoo in the media with thousands of gaping onlookers congregating outside the Collyer home in the hope of catching sight of the missing Langley. Police searching the building had to negotiate barricaded entry-points and huge junk-piles inside, rigged with nasty booby-traps to repel intruders. It seemed that everyman and his dog had an explanation to offer about the root cause of the Collyers tragic situation, with Journalists, Psychiatrists, Christian Socialists all having their say . . . even the famous novelist Howard Fast chipping in his two cents worth. It seems ironic that the lifestyle of Homer and Langley, New York's greatest hoarders who withdrew from the outside world for solitude and anonymity in their brownstone fortress of junk, should become the subject of intense public focus as a result of hyped-up media ballyhoo, for that very reason!! Recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Fortress of solitude.
Review: Both funny and sad, "Ghosty Men" by Franz Lidz, a tragedy that reads like a comedy, is the extraordinary, moving story of the real-life predicament of Homer and Langley Collyer, the New York "Hermits of Harlem", recluses in their four storey brownstone house from 1929 (when their mother died) to 1947 - Homer never venturing out after losing his sight in 1934, Langley rarely emerging and then usually only after dark. Barricaded in their fortress of solitude, appalling pong everywhere, inches thick coating of dust over everything, surrounded by stockpiles of boxes, crates and stacks of yellowing newspaper (hoarded over decades) with a mazelike network of passages, living out a ghost-like existence in a void of dead and empty, meaningless time, the Collyers remained static in a time-warp year-upon-year, decades that saw Harlem transformed into a rundown black ghetto.
Sensitive in his approach to the Collyers, affording them respect and dignity, Lidz cross-cuts in alternate chapters to his own eccentric Uncle Arthur, who like Langley Collyer, spent a lifetime amassing an astonishing assortment of junk, never passing up an opportunity to lift the lid of a dumpster. Uncle Arthur chapters contain hilarious moments, heartbreak and fascinating insights into old-time New York characters and a New York that is no longer - but for this reader, eager to get back to the Collyers, proved something of a sideshow distraction from the billed main feature.
In 1938, following years of reclusive anonymity, the Collyers suddenly found themselves catapulted into the public arena, thrust into the harsh glare of the national media spotlight when the story of their bizarre existence was widely reported. Much later, when Homer was found dead in 1947 and word spread that Langley had disappeared, there followed an enormous explosion of hyped-up media ballyhoo with thousands of gaping onlookers congregating outside the Collyer home in the hope of catching sight of the missing Langley. Police searching the building had to negotiate barricaded entry-points and huge junk-piles inside, rigged with nasty booby-traps to repel intruders.
It seemed that everyone had an explanation to offer about the root cause of the Collyers tragic situation, with Journalists, Psychiatrists, Christian Socialists all having their say . . . even the famous novelist Howard Fast chipping in. It seems ironic that the lifestyle of Homer and Langley, New York's greatest hoarders who withdrew from the outside world for solitude and anonymity in their brownstone fortress of junk, should become the subject of such intense public focus, for that very reason!! Recommended!
Rating:
Summary: A classic horror story
Review: Brothers Homer and Langley Collyer were entombed within the mountains of newspapers, books, life treasures and junk they had amassed to conceal themselves from the world. In a book that humanizes the pack-rat persona as it questions the mentality of the recluse, author Franz Lidz probes New York City's most storied hoarders in Ghosty Men. On March 21, 1947, New York police received a call about a dead body at a residence. When officers tried to tunnel into the Collyers' four-story house, they found an estimated 140 tons of junk, including 10 pianos, a disassembled car, chandeliers and mounds of newspapers. They also found Homer Collyer's body. The debris was so bad that Langley's body wasn't found until several weeks later. The once-stately home had become a catacomb through which the brothers had burrowed tunnels. Booby-traps of concrete and human waste were set to keep out prowlers. One of these had crushed Langley Collyer. The home eventually was emptied top to bottom out of fear that removing the ceiling-high mounds from the bottom floors first would allow the building to collapse. How such squalor, decay and detachment from urban life could happen to two educated men speaks volumes about society's emphasis on acquisition, privacy and personal isolation, novelist Howard Fast wrote in the Sept. 30, 1947, edition of the left-wing journal New Masses. "Property killed him," Fast wrote of Langley Collyer. Other theories abounded, including one from writer Dorothy Day, published in the May 1947 edition of the Catholic Worker Movement, who described "a very literal and appalling sample of the hell that awaits the acquisitive, the greedy." Others suggested that their Victorian upbringing, a domineering mother or obsessive-compulsive disorder were to blame. The story is a fascinating, real-life urban legend still played out today, when the elderly, emotionally disturbed or reclusive are found within homes overrun by pets and garbage, unable to care for themselves. Lidz tells of the Collyers' early lives in Harlem, a once-classy neighborhood of the rich that falls on hard times. The Collyers' lives, in part, become a means to study the decay of their surroundings.
Rating:
Summary: HARLEM'S HOARDING HERMITS...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Siblings who couldn't throw anything away
Review: First, I would like to thank my wife for keeping me from becoming one of the Collyer brothers.
Homer and Langley Collyer were a reclusive pair of New York bachelors who died in 1947 in the Harlem brownstone they had, over decades, filled with junk. Just finding the body of Homer, the elder Collyer, became part-archaeological dig, part-spelunking expedition. Thousands of curious New Yorkers gathered in the street as police climbed over and tunneled through mountains of newspapers, magazines, unopened mail, empty cans, bicycle parts and musical instruments, dodging the booby traps the brothers had set throughout the apartment to discourage interlopers.
The press ran with the story: Where was the fortune the brothers had reportedly squirreled away? Who were in the coffins supposedly in the basement? And where was the younger brother?
There ought to be a moral in this somewhere. Heap up worldly goods and they will bury you. But the story of the Collyers, fascinating and horrible as it is, resists easy conclusions.
Franz Lidz' previous book, Unstrung Heroes, tells about his own family of eccentric brothers. And one of them, Uncle Arthur, had more than a little of the Collyers in him. Like the Collyers, Uncle Arthur restlessly patrolled the streets and alleys of New York, picking up and carrying - or dragging - home everything that was not fastened down. (He was, at that, one of the saner Lidz brothers; others had to be institutionalized.)
Throughout, Ghosty Men alternates tales of the Collyers, derived mostly from contemporary press accounts, with the author's living memories of Uncle Arthur. All were bachelors, all had lived with their mothers well into middle age. But while the Collyers successfully withstood efforts at eviction and meddlesome authorities, Uncle Arthur eventually succumbed to a family clean-up.
"The emptiness is a little hard to get used to," he said, ruefully. "It makes me feel hollow."
Perhaps that comes about as close as anything to explaining why these men sought to live inside a fortress of junk. Something of a collector himself, Lidz gathers a few quotes from psychiatrists. But in the end, he is as baffled as anyone. Hoarding apparently is just a human instinct; sometimes it gets out of hand.
But those of us guilty - or perhaps only addicted to - Collyerish behavior can take comfort from these interwoven stories: We are not alone. Fortunately, most of us hold ourselves in check, or are held in check by prudent spouses and loving or concerned families.
The Collyers had none such. The sad thing about their lives was not that they hoarded, but that, unlike Uncle Arthur, they somehow slipped through the web of human attachments that softens or accommodates our wilder instincts.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing and really, really funny
Review: Ghosty Men is unflinching and clear-sighted, full of insights and illuminations, full of wholly realized characters and closely observed detail, and as dense and weighty as a novel. It also made me laugh.
Rating:
Summary: Packed with good stuff
Review: Got a family member who's a pack rat? It's a safe bet that they are probably not as compulsive as Homer and Langley Collyer, who lived with their massive amounts of junk in an NYC brownstone. When the police excavated the brothers' mansion in a search for Langley (who went missing after Homer's death) they removed 180 tons of debris.
The Collyers kept 10 pianos, a disassembled car (or two) and a dozen gas chandeliers, among many, many, many other things in their four-story home at 128th and Fifth, where they lived - and rarely left - from 1909 to 1947.In his new book, Franz Lidz recounts the shocking, funny, heartbreaking tale of these remarkable hoarders. He also intersperses chapters with episodes of his Uncle Arthur, the obsessive shoelace-gathering relative who was featured in Lidz's memoir, Unstrung Heroes.
Rating:
Summary: An enlightened look into a dark world
Review: Homer Collyer died in his Harlem brownstone in March 1947. His body was discovered amid the 180 tons of debris littering the apartment he shared with his brother Langley. This book is the story of Homer and Langley and the author's Uncle Arthur, and their lives as hermits and hoarders. In reading Ghosty Men, there came a stage when I no longer waited breathlessly for what came next, but instead found a new pleasure in seeing how exquisitely it was done.
Rating: 
Summary: CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR
Review: I picked this book up with great anticipation expecting to read a fabulous, intresting account about the fabbled ghosty men. What a great subject for a book - unfortunately Mr. Lidz either didn't see the great potential or wasn't up to the task. Ghosty Men is extremely disappointing. It wanders all over the place. Undeveloped stories about their exploits are all over the place. Continuity is lacking, making it very difficult and annoying to follow without having to go back to previously stated facts (or never stated) to understand things clearly. The real sorry part is that this had potential to make a really good book from a number of differnt angles, all of which could have been woven into a marvelous tapestry. Unfortunately, Mr Lidz lacks the knowledge of weaving and flow. To bad. I imagine some movie studio will pick up on what could have been accomplished and will probably produce an informative, important, and maybe even fun work.
|
