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." ( )

Is it bad that, after reading this book, these men became my instant heroes? You'll have to read the book (ha, ha-- librarian trick) to find out. From my point of view, they're ensconsed warmly amongst their piles of junk, their tottering piles of old newspaper, their stacks upon stacks of boxes, their miscellania gathered from the sides of the road and trash cans-- four floors of bliss! Protection from the outside world! A true, not-metaphorical barrier from the slings of everyday life! I sleep (candid admission!) with piles of junk surrounding me on my bed. To be surrounded by piles of junk in an entire decaying old New York mansion? Indescribable bliss. My only complaint about this book is that it does not spend quite enough time on the Collyer Brothers themselves, dwelling more instead on Uncle Arthur (fascinating himself). But Five-plus stars to the lifestyle. ( )