cover image Unstrung Heroes

Unstrung Heroes

Franz Lidz. Random House (NY), $18.95 (194pp) ISBN 978-0-394-56988-8

A family dominated by zany, at times seriously off-track brothers is recalled in this bittersweet history of an unusual Jewish household. Lidz, who writes for Sports Illustrated , relates the absurd domestic dramas provoked by his father's four brothers, who abided by no law or convention and practiced strange scavenging and hoarding habits, e.g., of shoelaces. Their antics, however, were lovingly integrated into the Long Island childhood of the author and his sister whose mother was ill with cancer for years. The men became even more important, and problematical, to the author after his mother's death and his preoccupied father's remarriage to a complaining, ungenerous woman. Lidz's funny, rueful memoir reaches beyond his daft uncles, unrelenting punsters and sometimes wise fools, to the grandfather who ``set the pattern for eccentricity that his sons later elaborated into rococco.'' (Feb.)