Tag: michael finkel

In these troubling economic times, you can’t amass a giant art collection without robbing a few hundred museums any more.

An excerpt from The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit — Michael Finkel’s book on Christopher Knight, the hermit who survived by committing 1,000 break-ins over nearly three decades.

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.” True hermits, according to […]