Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders, An Urban Historical

Rating:
Summary: Poignant and dark-humored
Review: This book on New York's quintessential hoarders shimmers with dabs of color that bring the entire portait to life. Franz Lidz interlaces the story of the Collyers brothers with that of his own packrat Uncle Arthur, whom the youthful author admired "for his commitment to extreme squalor," his rejection of order and convention. Maybe touched, maybe crazy, these "ghosty men" defy Freudian analysis: Lidz's sympathetic evaluation makes more sense: "They tried to build personal utopias behind drawn shades and locked shutters from oddments of their own childhood, mementoes of their families, and parapets of newspapers... they found themselves trapped by their own fantasies."

Rating:
Summary: Odd and wonderful
Review: This is an odd little book about odd little men, with some New York City history thrown in for flavor. Homer and Langley Collyer were known as the "Hermits of Harlem" until Homer's death in 1947 when he was 65 (for the sake of readers who've never heard of the Collyers, we won't ruin a rather macabre surprise by saying where Langley was when Homer's body was found). Nine years earlier, a newspaper reporter had discovered the eccentric brothers living in disarray in their family home in Harlem, surrounded by the result of a lifetime of obsessive collecting. Lidz alternates the Collyers' story with that of his uncles, Danny and Arthur, who had some quirks of their own (one of Arthur's was a passion for hoarding junk). Lidz wrote about his family in his book "Unstrung Heroes," which became a film by Diane Keaton. He says that the Collyer brothers and his uncles had "a commitment to extreme squalor" and "valued shoelaces and tin cans as much as Old Masters and grand pianos." Their stories are odd, charming and sad.

Rating:
Summary: funny, heartbreaking, terrifying and utterly weird.
Review: this is one hell of a yarn.
the storytelling is unsparing and deeply felt.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!!! Pretty unbelievable!!!
Review: This is one strange story beautifully told. The chapters on the Collyers Brothers are fascinating. The chapters on the author's Uncle Arthur and really, really funny and very touching in their way. I loved the one that takes place in a Times square flea circus.

Rating:
Summary: THE FIND OF THE YEAR
Review: This is the kind of book I like: it tells me things I want to know about the Collyer brothers, what they ate, what they wore, who they knew (in their case... nobody), at what time they went to bed and with whom (again.. nobody), and, most importantly, their place in time, 1930-'40s Harlem. A sobering and salutory attempt to estimate what these legendary hoarders (and the author's Uncle Arthur) were, what they achieved and what it cost them. Best of all, Ghosty Men made me laugh.

Rating:
Summary: A funny, fascinating and well thought-out tale
Review: This story is based on newspaper accounts of two old men who died alone and unremarked in a neglected old fire-trap of a house which was found to be stuffed to the ceiling with trash and their 'precious items'. The author has spun an engrossing scenario of the lives of the two brothers from their childhood to their deaths, to account for what might have taken them to that point of madness. He throws in the moving and frequently hilarious tale of his uncle, Arthur, for good measure. The details of these hoarders' descent into madness, their efforts to live a sane existence in spite of their experiences, and then the gradual acceptance of the futility of such a desire, is terribly sad and poignant. There is a point where the conclusion becomes inevitable and one wants to shout, as if to a movie screen, "No, not that way!", and with as much effect. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: The Story of Junk
Review: Why are people so fascinated with smell-o-rama stories about humans living with old newspapers and cat food and an accumulation of objects that is in essence the building of a grave? Perhaps the answer is in the question, a self-torturous mental romp in the decay, slime, and ooze that awaits us all.New York's twelve daily newspapers fought for scoops for over a decade, beginning in 1938 ("Booby Traps Grow Deadly!" "Thousands Gape!"), about the Collyer brothers-Columbia grads who barricaded themselves inside a Harlem brownstone with 180 tons of debris, 13 mantel clocks, 110 grand pianos, and jars of human excrement, falling deeper and deeper into a utopia of refuse, defying physical limits and making time disappear in their neither-with-you-nor-without-youfolie à deux. (When Homer lost his sight, he and his brother, Langley, decided that Homer would "eat one hundred oranges a week." When they stopped using electricity, Langley said it was because "Homer can't see. . . . As for me, I prefer it a trifle shady.") By the end, Homer had not left the house for seven years and when he did, it was in a canvas sack. (At this point, story-breaking New World reporter Helen Worden, tipped off by the corner druggist, arrives on the scene and the cop says, "This is your baby, Miss Worden, and the final chapter's being written right now.") It took the police 16 more days to find Langley "wedged between a mahogany chest and an old sewing machine. The rats had eaten half the face . . . but he was still identifiable."
Franz Lidz embraces the era's zest, crosscutting the Collyer story with that of his debris-collecting Uncle Arthur, the star of Lidz's memoir, Unstrung Heroes, who had a similar kind of gothic doubling (fitful relationship with his brother in the Bronx) and who was also a hoarder, the kind who put an equal value on everything but who never quite got over a feeling of not meeting the Collyers' high accumulation standards. "You gotta have brains to collect that much stuff," he says. Though layering two narratives is tricky (wait, I thought we were in Homer's house and now we're in Uncle Arthur's and can't we just move forward dramatically and the Collyers are more interesting anyway because they were so remote and so attached to their late mother), Lidz's affection for his uncle energizes what could just be someone else's history.