It all started with the gift of a stamp collection from my Uncle Horatio when I was eleven. Brookline, Massachusetts, where I grew up, was a respectable middle class Boston suburb. Boys like me were groomed from an early age for safe, respectable careers in law, medicine, or business by parents who, having survived the Great Depression, craved nothing more than social and economic stability. I nearly went down that route, following my father, at his insistence, into his small law practice where …

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