I am a big fan of roughly half of Doctorow's work. Though this one started with a sense of greatness, ultimately it falls in line with the least favored half of his oeuvre for me. Like several others reviewers, I was disenchanted by Doctorow's blatant changes to the Collyer brothers' story. The trut...
The Collyer brothers were real. Doctorow has brilliantly told a fictionalized account of their lives. Both brothers were disabled. Homer became blind in his teens and Langley was war wounded from exposure to mustard gas in World War I. He was also surely emotionally damaged, perhaps from the war, an...
Doctorow reimagines the lives of two famous New York eccentrics as a way of touring the twentieth century's ups and downs. The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, inherit their parents' mansion at the far north end of Fifth Avenue, across from the park, just at the end of the (first) World War. At ...
Took forever to finish this because it moves so slowly and gets really tedious, but it's one of those "gotta read it" because of the author kind of books. It's the story of two brothers who live in NYC in a house on upper 5th Ave that deteriorates over the years as they do. One brother is half crazy...
I've read enough memoirs to be able to say that "Homer Collyer", the narrator of this novel, definitely doesn't write like someone who was born in 1881 (when the real Homer Collyer was). To be sure, E. L. Doctorow has distorted the timeline of this story in an unrealistic manner, extending the broth...
Read this as an alternative history of the Collyer brothers. Not unlike Star Trek (2009), the main characters wind up where they were before and similar to themselves, though dislocated in time. I'm sure Doctorow had great fun coming up with explanations for the inexplicable--why so many typewriters...
The bachelor Collyer brothers, of a respected family, were reclusive hoarders who lived in a Manhattan brownstone. After their bodies were found in 1947 more than a hundred tons of trash was removed from their house. Doctorow has taken the historical pair and put them to other uses. He looks at a w...
This was an amazing book. I have always heard what a wonderful writer E.L. Doctorow is. This book felt like a window into a very private world of the two Collyer brothers. Reknowned for the state of their junk packed house and the sad story of their deaths, Doctorow brings to life two real, compas...
This was my first book by Doctorov, I enjoyed his writing a lot. I also was not bothered by him taking liberties with the main characters' RL history, before I picked the boook I did not know they existed.Having said it, I am not sure if I will be keeping the book, just a bit too depressing for my t...
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