Download or read book Ghosty Men written by Franz Lidz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-22 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true tale of changing New York by Franz Lidz, whose Unstrung Heroes is a classic of hoarder lore. 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, Ghosty Men is a perfect fit for Bloomsbury's Urban Historicals series.
Download or read book Homer Langley written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Beautiful and haunting . . . one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home.”—The Boston Globe SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Booklist Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers—wars, political movements, technological advances—and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Praise for Homer & Langley “Masterly.”—The New York Times Book Review “Doctorow paints on a sweeping historical canvas, imagining the Collyer brothers as witness to the aspirations and transgressions of 20th century America; yet this book’s most powerfully moving moments are the quiet ones, when the brothers relish a breath of cool morning air, and each other’s tragically exclusive company.”— O: The Oprah Magazine “A stately, beautiful performance with great resonance . . . What makes this novel so striking is that it joins both blindness and insight, the sensual world and the world of the mind, to tell a story about the unfolding of modern American life that we have never heard in exactly this (austere and lovely) way before.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Wondrous . . . inspired . . . darkly visionary and surprisingly funny.” —The New York Review of Books “Cunningly panoramic . . . Doctorow has packed this tale with episodes of existential wonder that cpature the brothers in all their fascinating wackiness.”—Elle
Download or read book Mongo written by Ted Botha and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-06-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing journey inside the eccentric world of nonprofessional garbage collectors offers a series of colorful portraits of all kinds of collectors unified by their mutual obsession with mongo, discarded items rescued from the trash, despite their individual motivations for collecting. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
Download or read book The Eccentropedia written by Chris Mikul and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An A-Z of eccentrics! 250 true stories of the most original and outrageous people on earth, from bad poets to transsexual evolutionary theorists this encyclopedic guide covering ancient times to the present, includes reams of material never seen in book form before. Famous eccentrics like King Ludwig, Salvador Dalí and Howard Hughes rub shoulders with a host of lesser-known, but equally colorful, characters in these -- mostly -- life-affirming stories. There are unsuspected parallels and connections throughout creating an alternative, off-kilter history of the world.
Download or read book Howl written by Bark Editors and published by Crown. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pot roast left unguarded. An open bedroom door. An ill-timed squat. Dogs seem to have impeccable timing. Yet how quickly calamity turns to comedy in the company of a dog, and the wrong moment turns out to be just the right one. In this delightful follow-up to Dog Is My Co-Pilot, which won the Best Book of the Year award from the Dog Writers Association of America, the editors of The Bark bring together more stories, essays, and artwork that highlight the hilarity of dog behavior and the comical interactions between dog people and their four-legged friends. From playful puppies who wreak havoc in the home to dogs with a whole array of comic shticks and tricks, Howl celebrates the verve and the laughs pets offer their people. It includes laugh-out-loud reflections (and confessions), rib-tickling tales, and whimsical vignettes from well-known writers such as: • Dave Barry • Margaret Cho • Al Franken • Kinky Friedman • Pam Houston • Haven Kimmel • Neal Pollack • And many more!
Download or read book Brothers written by George Howe Colt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blends history and memoir in an account that in alternating chapters explores the author's quest to understand the impact of his brothers on his life and the complex relationships between iconic brothers, including the Thoreaus, the Van Goghs, and the Marxes.
Download or read book Objects of Our Desire written by Salman Akhtar and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes something sexy? Why are some things regarded as sacred and others profane? Why do mourners face such difficulty in parting with their beloved’s possessions? Why do we often feel distraught when we lose something, even when the object has little real value? We spend our lives in a meaningful dialogue with things around us. Sometimes the conversation is loud, as in a collector’s passion for coins or art. More often, the exchange is subtle and muted, even imperceptible. We are surrounded by things, and they affect our emotions and impact our thoughts. The arrival of a dozen flowers from a lover or a letter from a grandchild makes our day; an old photo album or an afghan knitted by a favorite aunt offers comfort when we are troubled. From exploring what makes something “beautiful” to why we place such value on antiques and artifacts from the past, Objects of Our Desire offers insights, both deep and delightful, into the ways we invest things with meaning and the powerful roles they play in our lives. Notice the inviting contours of that sofa, the glint of a knife’s edge, the sparkle of a diamond ring. Feel the softness of the pashmina around that woman’s milky shoulders. Look at the majesty of a large jet plane. Take in the somberness of a gravestone. Put on an old pair of shoes. Clutch a warm mug of freshly brewed coffee. Sit on a rocking chair. Feel the sumptuous leather seats of a new car. We are surrounded by things. We are involved with them, indebted to them. We speak to things and things speak to us. To say that we are interdependent is banal. Let us be courageous. Let us admit it: we are lovers. —From Objects of Our Desire
Download or read book Mess One Man s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act written by Barry Yourgrau and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-08-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hilarious and poignant, a glimpse into the mind of someone who is both a sufferer from and an investigator of clutter. Millions of Americans struggle with severe clutter and hoarding. New York writer and bohemian Barry Yourgrau is one of them. Behind the door of his Queens apartment, Yourgrau’s life is, quite literally, chaos. Confronted by his exasperated girlfriend, a globe-trotting food critic, he embarks on a heartfelt, wide-ranging, and too often uproarious project—part Larry David, part Janet Malcolm—to take control of his crammed, disorderly apartment and life, and to explore the wider world of collecting, clutter, and extreme hoarding. Encounters with a professional declutterer, a Lacanian shrink, and Clutterers Anonymous—not to mention England’s most excessive hoarder—as well as explorations of the bewildering universe of new therapies and brain science, help Yourgrau navigate uncharted territory: clearing shelves, boxes, and bags; throwing out a nostalgic cracked pasta bowl; and sorting through a lifetime of messy relationships. Mess is the story of one man’s efforts to learn to let go, to clean up his space (physical and emotional), and to save his relationship.
Download or read book Of Hoarding and Housekeeping written by Sasha Newell and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hoarding has largely been approached from a psychological and universal perspective, and decluttering from an aesthetic and ecological one, while little work has been done to think about the cultural and global economic aspects of these phenomena. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering using cases from a variety of countries including US, Japan, India, Cameroon, and Argentina. Focusing on the house, with careful attention to material flows in and out, this book examines practices of accumulation, storage, decluttering, and waste as practices of kinship and the objects themselves as material kin.
Download or read book The Hoarding Impulse written by Renee Winters and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been an increased awareness of hoarding in recent years, but clinical treatments aimed at helping people with this condition often have low success rates. In The Hoarding Impulse Renee M. Winters explores how depth psychology can enrich current conceptual models and treatment standards for compulsive hoarding. The book presents case studies of prominent sufferers including Edie and Edith Beale, the Collyer Brothers, and Andy Warhol and explores common themes of loss, shame and object clusters. Winters sets out to provide a clear understanding of a hoarder’s lived experiences and their core schemas of value, worth and personal identity, revealing a direct connection to excessive acquisition of objects. She illuminates the process of how objects can come to possess a hoarder and become not only their main source of happiness but also part of their identity and in doing so puts forward a new treatment plan based on providing a deeper understanding of and potent treatment approach to what is a core issue for hoarding individuals: the wounding of the soul. This new perspective to treating individuals who hoard helps them in the long term understand their processes, value system, and struggles with negative interpersonal relationships. Providing a fascinating insight into the psyche of people who struggle with hoarding, this book will be essential reading for depth psychologists, Jungian psychotherapists, psychiatrists, social workers, students of analytical psychology and anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of this complex condition.
Download or read book Empire of Scrounge written by Jeff Ferrell and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption.
Download or read book Real Men Shift Complete Series A Paranormal Shapeshifter Werewolf Boxed Set written by Celia Kyle and published by Summerhouse Publishing. This book was released on with total page 1377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They’re werewolves—fierce, dangerous, deadly, and… hunting for their mates. Grab the entire bestselling, scorching hot Real Men Shift series in one boxed set! Real Men Howl - Mason Blackwood’s inner wolf will go crazy without her. Lucy thinks he’s already crazy. Werewolves aren’t real. Right? Real Men Snarl - Ally doesn't want to have anything to do with werewolves. Kade Blackwood is a werewolf who wants to do everything to Ally. Real Men Growl - Gavin Blackwood expected gratitude, but what he got was a gorgeous she-wolf who defied him at every turn. Real Men Scratch - Who knew getting kidnapped could be so fun? Real Men Bite - His wolf wants her to submit. She wants him to heel. Real Men Claim - He lost it all… until he found her. Real Men Hunt - She's willing to sacrifice anything to save Wolf Woods from developers—including love. He refuses to let her.
Download or read book Unstrung Heroes written by Franz Lidz and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Down in the Dumps written by Jani Scandura and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-07 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era “dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place. An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.
Download or read book My Husband s Under Here Somewhere written by Janice Strubbe Wittenberg, RN and published by Spiral Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hoarders collect to excess, filling bathtubs, closets, kitchens, garages, storage sheds—floor-to-ceiling—to render their living spaces uninhabitable. They’re so consumed they lose jobs, family and friends, homes, health, and occasionally their lives. To the rest us, these people seem bizarre or mentally ill, and we view their challenges with impatience, frustration and simplistic answers. Yet a true fix isn’t so simple. My Husband’s Under Here Somewhere, however, strives to unearth them. Morbidly fascinating tales abound as the lives of hoarders who amass animals and collectors who spin out of control are examined. The science behind hoarding—including its link with Obsessive-Compulsive disorders—as well as promising forms of treatment, meet with consideration. Our materialistic culture, one that’s obsessed with with having more and more, further informs the narrative. Certain types of stockpiling stem from challenging life experiences. A fellow who’d been imprisoned in a Russian Gulag spent the remainder of his days amassing keys. Jodin, a resistance fighter during World War II, is a consummate saver of twine. For her, a possession of such insignificance once meant the difference between extinction and survival. As a boy, Norman’s father insisted the house be kept as neat as a pin. Should anything fall out of place—absolutely anything—and he got beaten. So nowadays, he thoroughly enjoys his messes and views them as a way to get even. Ordinary hoarders and extreme collectors notwithstanding, they’re also found among the rich and famous. Peter the Great kept a human zoo of freakish oddities, and also enjoyed excising his subjects’ teeth, adding them to his vast assemblage. The hapless Collyer brothers crammed their Manhattan brownstone to the brim and accidentally entombed themselves within it. Unable to part with his shorn locks and nail clippings, Howard Hughes stored them away for “safekeeping.” Then there’s China’s remarkable Emperor Qin. After he conquered all surrounding kingdoms, he constructed 270 palaces to live in. As if that weren’t enough, he built roads and dug irrigation canals alongside, standardized laws, established a system of weights and measures, created a form of currency, and then formalized the use of written characters. While not a hoarder by today's’ standards, he was, quite possibly, the first to promulgate the axiom, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Eccentricity, wealth and death aside, each of the aforementioned had way too much stuff, which is a problem familiar to most of us. Dare to quest for answers as to why this is so, and our acquisitive culture must be examined. Harnessing humor and compassion, My Husband’s Under Here Somewhere does precisely that. As the first of its kind, this book of narrative non-fiction looks at hoarding and collecting as part of a continuum. And, while many self-help decluttering books and hoarding-related memoirs, as well as works dealing with Obsessive-Compulsive Hoarding already exist, none of them focus on the psycho-spiritual ramifications of suffocating to death beneath heaps of possessions. Hopefully, this publication will appeal to hoarders and collectors, as well as family, friends and neighbors impacted by the hoarder’s behaviors. It’s also for clinicians and public agencies in search of positive ways to respond. Lastly, it's for curious folks who seek to understand.
Download or read book First Descents written by Richard Bangs and published by Menasha Ridge Press. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dropping into the unknown on a rubber raft, hurled against rocks and cliff walls, only to round a blind bend, go vertical on a 10-foot standing wave, and flip over backwards into a deafening vat of near-freezing whitewater. Such is life for the brave souls who commit themselves to exploring the world’s untried rivers. First Descents collects the most enthralling tales from the world’s most respected river explorers. Vivid portrayals in the adventurers’ own words and original photographs tell of solitary efforts and major expeditions on rivers both famous and unknown, including the Yangtze River in China, the Colorado River in Arizona, Ethiopa’s Baro River, and the Braldu River in Pakistan. With stories from Royal Robbins, Tao Berman, Yvonne Chouinard, and others, this newly revised and expanded edition of the 1989 classic captures the excitement, fear, and elation of over four decades of river exploration.
Download or read book Possessed written by Rebecca R. Falkoff and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.
