Rating: 
Summary: Invest Elsewhere
Review: I'm not a fan of fiction, but interest in the Collyer's story led me to read My Brother's Keeper, Marcia Davenport's account based on the lives of Homer and Langley. Beautifully written, this book stayed with me for years until I tracked it down and added it to my personal library. Therefore, when I learned that Lidz had written a non-fiction account, I was eager to add it to my collection. I had to order it sight unseen, (entirely my fault) yet I looked forward with great anticipation to reading it. As I dove in, I was deeply disappointed with the way the story unfolded. (Not to mention the overall size and length of the book)Lidz barely scratched the surface of the complexity of their lives. I understand the personal parallels that led Lidz to intertwine his uncles' story with the Collyers', but frankly, if I wanted to read about his uncles, I would have purchased his other book. As a result, you get half the book (in length and story quality) for twice the price. ....
Rating: 
Summary: A Strange, Moving, Wonderfully-Told Tale
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Good things can also come in small packages
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Compassion, funny and frightening
Review: Lidz entwines the story of Homer and Langly Collyer, who had filled their Harlem mansion with junk by the time of their deaths in the late 1940s, with the story of his own eccentric Uncle Arthur, whose hobby was collecting junk. The Collyers, who were wealthy and well-educated, moved into Harlem with their parents in 1909 when the region was an exclusive, all-white neighborhood and remained as the neighborhood changed color and character. Although one had been a lawyer and the other a pianist, they withdrew into their home, only venturing out at night to roam the city, collecting junk. Both fascinated and repelled their neighbors. One tenant referred to them as "the ghosty men." They were made famous by World-Telegram reporter Helen Worden, who included them in a book about hermits. Their bizarre deaths were popular newspaper fodder of the era. Uncle Arthur is remembered by Lidz with great humor and bemused fondness.
Rating:
Summary: An exhaustive and witty work
Review: Magnificent and engrossing, Ghosty Men draws on a stunning array of fresh material to create a three-dimensional portrait of a truly strange family. Every page is fascinating reading. Ghosty Men signals a major advance in our thinking about the Collyer brothers and the special place they occupy in hoarding and collecting lore.
Rating:
Summary: A DAFFY TALE
Review: Moderately wonderful, a ray of pale Manhattan sunshine in a gray world.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Most obsessive-compulsives are aware that their behavior is illogical. A sufferer knows that he locked the front door because he has already checked it 11 times. Yet he just has to check it again: Part of his information-processing circuitry has been rerouted into a kind of continuous loop, resulting in an inability to gain satisfaction from completing an act -- closure, if you will (if you must). Something similar happens to hoarders, those odd folk who fill nearly every cubic inch of their homes with ordinary things they never throw away -- newspapers, utility bills, phone books, plastic bags, rubber bands -- and all the bric-a-brac and brac-a-bric they and the cats can drag in. Eventually, these places become catacombs, navigable only by treading carefully along dank, narrow, zig-zagging paths. The occupants tend to be ignored, then missed, then found long dead, entombed, buried under a landslide triggered by some tectonic shift in the Andean mounds of their moldering treasure. Unlike compulsive hand-washers and stove- and front-door checkers, however, these people are at peace with their clutter-loving selves. At some point, deep within their skulls, there was a stray spark, a short, and their assessment of normality underwent a fundamental realignment. Their vast, if mostly paper, holdings come to comprise a significant part -- perhaps the greatest part -- of their very identity. Now Franz Lidz (whose "Unstrung Heroes," a profile of his eccentric uncles, became a critically praised film) has crafted "Ghostly Men" as part of Bloomsbury's Urban Historical series. It's a sweet, warm, jaw-dropping kick in the pants. In 1907, the Columbia University-educated brothers Homer and Langley Collyer moved into a fine brownstone in what was then white upper-class Harlem. By the late 1920s, only Langley was seen in public. He would emerge late at night, his clothing stately but years out of date, pulling a cardboard box with a rope. In the morning, he would return with a few groceries and whatever items of interest he came across. Although shy, he was always lucid, even friendly, except when anyone tried to enter the house or remove trash from the yard. Then he would become frantic and incensed, screaming for the police -- unless it was the police, in which case he'd become frantic and incensed and scream at the police instead of for them. When in 1947 it occurred to neighbors that no one had seen ol' Langley for a while, officials began an assault. Hours later, they had made two feet of headway. Many, many hours later, they found Homer, dead. It took them more than a week to find Langley. He was 10 feet away. The house contained more than 180 tons of junk, including a dismantled automobile, numerous pianos (Langley had performed at Carnegie Hall), an early X-ray machine "and, sadly, a brand-new shirt, size 15, with a bright scarlet tie, left unworn in a box never opened for twenty-nine years. A birthday card dated October 3, 1918, read, 'To Langley, with many happy returns this day, Pop.' " But "Ghostly Men" is no freak show in prose. For all the bizarre (and bizarrely compelling) details, Lidz treats the Collyers with the same respect and dignity they inspired in just about everyone who ever met them. He brings it all back home by interrupting tales of the Collyers, mostly gleaned from newspaper and magazine accounts, with fond reminiscences of his Uncle Arthur, one of the "Unstrung Heroes" and a serious collector of trash in his own right. "I'm getting used to having space," 85-year-old Uncle Arthur said after the author and five of the author's (former?) friends hauled away his junk in 417 large, heavy-duty bags, "but it's still empty space." After reading "Ghostly Men," I cleared up the papers on a long-neglected counter top and straightened two stacks of books. It's a start.
Rating:
Summary: Should Be Required Reading For Kids
Review: New York City firefighters call them "Collyers" - junk-jammed apartments or houses littered with old newspapers, deteriorated cardboard boxes and decaying debris. The term goes back more than 50 years when New York's famous hermits, Harlemites Homer and Langley Collyer, stockpiled their four-story brownstone mansion with so much junk that no one could enter their building safely. The New York Department of Sanitation ordered its workers sprayed with DDT before cleaning up the Collyer's building in 1947.
In Ghosty Men, Franz Lidz describes the Collyers (dubbed by the media as the "Hermits of Harlem") as preeminent junk collectors. Holed up for more than 25 years, the Collyers had been caught in a turn-of-the-century time warp as Harlem turned from a white, upper-class suburb to a predominantly poor, black community. The brothers, rarely seen in public, were tight with their money, and dressed 40 years out of step, with high-buttoned serge suits and flowing Windsor silk bow ties.
At the time of their deaths, Lidz writes, the Collyer brothers had accumulated 140 tons of rotting junk, consisting of everything from fractured frying pans to crushed umbrellas. "Chipped chandeliers and tattered toys, and everywhere, everywhere, newspapers, thousands and thousands of newspapers, stuffed under furniture, stacked in unsteady piles against the walls," Lidz writes.
While the Collyers set the standard in junk collection, Lidz doesn't solely focus on the two - but skillfully weaves their captivating, screwball legend around the story of his Uncle Arthur, considered by family members as the lost Collyer brother.
Lidz admires Arthur's commitment to extreme squalor and says his uncle was "actually the last flowering of a generation of hoarders, an obsessive breed of Collyerian pack rats who never pass a dumpster without lifting the lid."Shoelaces were as important to Arthur as Faberge eggs were to Malcolm Forbes.
Arthur lived with his brother Harry. Unlike the Collyers, they made an odd couple. Harry wasn't a collector, and Arthur's junk got on his nerves. And also unlike the Collyers, Arthur and Harry enjoyed their celebrity when Lidz's book Unstrung Heroes (a story about them) was made into a movie. Langley and Homer Collyer never enjoyed the spotlight, Lidz notes. Much to their aggravation, they had gained notoriety in 1938, when World-Telegram reporter Helen Worden wrote a story about the reclusive brothers. After Worden's piece ran, they measured their notoriety in column inches.
His uncle never gained the Collyers' celebrity. And even though Uncle Arthur started picking up stuff from the streets at 15, he never quite got over the feeling that he couldn't meet the Collyers' high standard of junk connoisseurship.
"I'd walk by their house and wonder what of value did they have," Arthur told Lidz. "You gotta have brains to collect that much stuff . . . They had their junk up to the windows. I didn't have that much."
When Harry moved to a nursing home, Arthur expanded his junk and nearly covered every cubic inch of his apartment with "heaps of stuff."After Arthur's landlord complained that his junk was too heavy for the ceiling below, Arthur reluctantly gave up and let Lidz help clean out his apartment. "The emptiness is a little hard to get used to," Arthur told Lidz. "My junk was like a friend . . . sort of freedom . . . it's like somebody had died."
The Collyers, who accepted change as long as it was outside their brownstone walls, had fought off city evictions and bank foreclosures, only to be found dead among the refuse in their dilapidated brownstone. Building engineers made the city clean-up crews work from the top floors down, in fear that the house might collapse if the junk, which included a Model T Ford and canoe in the basement, was pulled out of the lower floors first. Police officer's blue uniforms were white and covered with cobwebs and inches of dust when they exited the brownstone.
Ghosty Men is a poignant and engrossing tale that should be required reading for little boys who refuse to clean their rooms. Lidz, a former broadcaster and journalist, knows his way around a compelling story and manages to strike a balance between the absurd and the amusing. As an added bonus, he stuffs it full of historical perspective on the Harlem that grew around two men stuck in time.
Rating:
Summary: Lidz writes another winner
Review: No one should miss this gripping work. Humourous and superbly detailed, this will leave you chuckling while you plan your next trip to Goodwill.
Rating:
Summary: A knock-down, brass-bound, copper-bottomed triumph
Review: This book is a miracle of research, and Mr. Lidz writes well and with a miss-nothing intelligence. The Collyer brothers and his uncle are brought vividly to life; we hear and see them. It is an important book: it has resonance, it contains worlds; it satisfies.
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