This fascinating, true-life story is an easy read and is so chock-full of the sights, sound and smells of the author's world that you'll feel as though you've grown up with him. You'll come away from this story with a new understanding of the effect and long-term consequences of one very specific mental illness.

The author, Mort Zachter writes a quirky semi-auto biographical story of his life. I say "semi", because the real mystery this book revolves around are his two bachelor Uncles, Harry and Joe. Mort's Russian Jewish immigrant Grandparents, Max and Lena Wolk, opened a bakery in New York City in 1926. Uncles Harry and Joe not only came to work in the bakery, but before and after their parents died, their entire life seemed to be the bakery, or as they all called it, "The Store". The store was open seven days a week including the Sabbath, except for the High Holiday's and Passover week. They seemed to have had absolutely no other asset or interest in the world. Mort's mother Helen (Harry & Joe's sister.) would always get dragged into work at any hour of the day. Yet the Uncle's never paid her a cent.

Mort and his family lived in a barren Brooklyn apartment with nary a decoration nor ornament on the walls. Mort had to sleep in the kitchen on a fold up bed with his head near the refrigerator. The two bachelor uncles made Mort's parents look like high rollers. "Uncle Harry and Uncle Joe lived like paupers in the Mitchell-Lama housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side. They drove a twenty-year-old Buick that had been rear-ended and looked like a giant accordion. For years, they frequented the deeply discounted dental clinic at NYU, where interning students treated them." Meanwhile Mort attended Brooklyn College, which was basically a tuition-free school. He also received an academic-based Regent's Scholarship that paid for his books. He lived at home, and believed that the tuition cost at a private college was beyond their financial abilities. More recently as an adult, he had to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to put himself through four long, hard years of evening law school, took out a second mortgage, to adopt their son, and worried day and night when he was fired from his accounting job a few years later. Uncle Harry and Uncle Joe never offered even a penny to help.

When Uncle Joe died and Uncle Harry became plagued with dementia and had to live with Mort's parents, a phone call that Mort answered, started an unbelievable chain of events that led to this book! The caller was a broker at Smith Barney who said: "There is a million dollars in Harry's money-market account. I suggest you buy a million dollars worth of treasuries to maximize the return!" While still reeling from this million dollar shock, Mort decided to look through his Uncle's abandoned dilapidated apartment and check his mail. He then found two more brokerage statements each with over a million dollars in them, he found a U.S. Treasury Department account with almost a million dollars in it, and there also were numerous stocks and bonds! Uncle Harry was the original "SIX-MILLION-DOLLAR-MAN"! Later Mort found mattresses stuffed with coins and cake boxes filled with rolls of two-dollar bills! Mort and the reader are aghast! How could the Uncle's who lived like bums and never did anything or went anywhere have amassed this fortune, and more puzzling to Mort, how could they have never offered to help their only nephew? And of course the Uncle's never paid Helen. This is an interesting "truth is stranger than fiction" story.