Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

by Robert Sullivan

New York Public Library Book for the Teenager
New York Public Library Book to Remember
PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year

"Engaging...a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller.

Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. In Rats , the critically acclaimed bestseller, Robert Sullivan spends a year investigating a rat-infested alley just a few blocks away from Wall Street. Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat.

Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herds-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.

With an all-new Afterword by the author

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Science, Animals, Nature, New York, Microhistory

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Robert Sullivan is the author of Rats, The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, and most recently, The Thoreau You Don’t Know. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, A Public Space, and Vogue, where he is a contributing editor. He was born in Manhattan and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/robert...

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is not about rats. I learned a few things about them (they can collapse their bodies and can squeeze through any hole as big as their heads; they can take cats in a fight), but this book was mostly about the author's life and interviews of all sorts of terminally dull people intimately or slightly connected to rats. He made extermination boring (impossible!). The author himself was kind of a wuss when it came to both rats (understandable) and his interview subjects (deplorable in a journalist). His investigation of rats was limited to watching them from a chair outside an alley, and I swear an entire chapter was devoted to him trying but failing to gain a private audience with America's foremost rat expert at a rat convention. My search for the perfect rat resource skitters greasily on.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yesterday when I came out of my building, I was confronted by a giant rat standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up at me. Yeah, right at me. It was still light out, and the thing just stood there stolidly gazing up, unafraid, just, yeah, looking at me! See, my front yard is infested with large, fearless rats. They live in a hole in the dirt and frolic in the garbage. The hole's recently been plugged up, but the rats don't seem to care; as this book reminds us, they're adaptable animals. I've sat on my stoop on a fine spring day, watching the big rats romp in the yard, climbing into bags of trash and writhing joyously around inside, like the cartoon rat Templeton in that memorable fair scene in the Charlotte's Web movie.

Anyway, this rat yesterday clearly wanted something, and I took its keenly intimidating, beady-eyed stare to mean that it was telling me that I'd better review this book. Since I'm currently on the bus to Philadelphia (INTERNET! On the BUS! I'm like a RAT in a FILTHY REEKING GARBAGE BAG!!!), there's no time like the present.

Okay, so when I was in the first grade, my across-the-street frenemy Lindsay Kagawa had a pet rat named Twinkie. Twinkie was what this book taught me is called a "fancy rat." She was little and delicate and black and white, and she lived in a cage in Lindsay's room. Lindsay and I both loved her rat, and we'd write letters to one another every day, letters that featured drawings of Twinkie engaged in a number of activities (e.g., getting married, doing ballet, holding balloons), letters that were hand delivered into mailboxes and adorned with pencil-drawn stamps featuring portraits of -- who else? -- Twinkie the rat.

In the ninth grade, my friend Isabel Douglass had a fancy rat of her own, named Selene (she also had a zine called Selene, after the rat). Isabel was a forward-thinking young lady, and as you might guess based on the silk-screened "Rent is Theft" tee shirt she wore every day, Selene had no cage, living instead on Isabel's very lovely, if not totally cleanly, person. I remember this being an issue when we'd go eat hot and sour soup at Long Life Veggie House, because restaurant people tended to become upset when Selene poked out, so it was a constant struggle for Isabel to keep her fancy rat concealed at these times. I think Selene eventually ran away from home (as Isabel herself had) to join her gutterpunk rat boyfriend who lived in a sewer. She was replaced by another pet rat -- I want to say Travis? -- but I'm not sure what happened to him. I think he eventually ran off too, to help build up the rat population of Berkeley. If rats don't have cages, they tend to run off. Also, rats are very sensual creatures, according to this book, anyway. Those rats have needs!

Anyway, at the time I looked upon both Twinkie and Selene as adorable little comrades, much to the horror and revulsion of my mother, a woman born and bred -- not incidentally -- on the island of Manhattan. My mother was thoroughly disgusted by the idea of rats as pets, and her hatred of rodents was something I never understood, either as a naive and anthropomorphizing child, or as an annoying anti-anthrocentric teenager. "Rats are cute, mom!" I said. "Rabbits are rodents. What makes rats grosser than rabbits? It doesn't make any sense why you hate them so much!"

"Ugh," she shuddered, and I rolled my eyes.

Then I moved to New York.... and now I get it. Well, I do and I don't. The sight and even the thought of rats is now one of the most disgusting things that I can imagine. When I see them running in the subway tracks or down the street, I watch, transfixed, but I'm also nauseated and repulsed. There is just something so -- revolting, so disturbing about these creatures. Vermin! Ugh!! The larger they are, the more disgusting and scary; the closer they get, the more horrifying, and the idea of large numbers of rats, of bands and tribes, of rats en masse, swarming and scurrying.... UGHH!! Every night when I come home I cross the front yard gingerly, terrified I'll step on one of them. To me rats now represent danger and disease, but there is something more there, deep seated and primal, something Jungian about my feelings towards them that I don't understand. Yeah, rats are gross -- they are filthy animals, they do eat garbage, they do live in sewers, they do bite people, they spread the plague and other diseases (a public health expert in this book calls them "germ elevators") -- but their repulsiveness still seems like more than the sum of their parts. I was hoping this book would explain this to me, or even better, that it would demystify my fear and loathing of the rat. I hoped that I could go back to the days of Twinkie and Selene and become, if not open to having them crawl all over my body, at least more comfortable sharing my space with these creatures who are, quite clearly, not going anywhere anytime soon.

But this book didn't do that. Let's be clear: Rats is a good book, and I learned a lot from it and found it thoroughly enjoyable. But precisely because it was good, I hold it to a higher standard, and I really think Rats needed one more serious, tough, grueling revision in order to become truly great and do some transcendent form of justice to its fascinating subject. Still, it's a worthwhile read, and contains some great New York City history, as well as interesting information about rats.

The premise of the book is that the author decides to spend a year watching rats in an alley in lower Manhattan, while also hanging out with exterminators and researching the history of tenant activism, bubonic plague, Revolutionary War-era Manhattan, and other kinds of obviously and not-so-obviously rat-related information. One thing I loved about this was that both alleys where Sullivan does his rat watching were right around the corner from my office, so I got to check out the locations he was discussing (though I didn't go at night, which is prime rat-watching time). My excitement about the neighborhood sort of made it okay that his rat watching didn't ultimately seem to have much of a point.

Sullivan's book isn't bad, but a lot stuff in here, like the rat watching, is interesting but never seems to go anywhere. I did get annoyed because he started with this sort of Transcendentalist, naturalist conceit about his rat-watching, which would've been great except it took him way too long to get over the silliness or oddness of his project. He should've just thrown himself into it and been like, "I am Thoreau, and this alley is my Walden," but he compromises that idea when halfway through the book he's still exclaiming, "OMG! I can't believe I'm watching rats, this is so crazy!" I know this seems like a minor complaint, but I wanted him to take it seriously from the beginning, and stop congratulating himself for the quirkiness of his idea. Sullivan does eventually give himself over to his topic, but for me it took him a little too long to do it, and once he got there, he didn't quite go far enough in pulling it all together. I think he was trying to say that people are really a lot like rats, but he didn't make that explicit enough, in a way that explained or illuminated our animosity towards them. He came really close, and started to get there at several points, especially at the end, but the book never quite came together and changed the way I thought about rats in a profound way. That's why I say this book needed one more thorough revision to go from great to good -- the elements were all there, but it didn't ever come together as amazingly as I wanted it to.

It did, however, make me think quite a lot about rats, something that's really been a problem because I've recently been running a lot, and seeing things move out of the corner of my eye has led to a lot of embarrassing screeching and sideways leaps into the air (it's always turned out to be a bird or a plastic bag -- knock wood). Rats were always on my mind while I was reading this, and I'm definitely more conscious now of their presence all around me, at all times -- ugh. I've always been grossed out by the heaps of garbage coating New York, especially during the summer, and I'm now even more disturbed by them. Gross! When we surround ourselves with garbage, we get the rats that we deserve....

Living in New York does make me feel like a rat, especially when I'm riding the train at rush hour. For years, that old Fear line about "rats in our cage" has scurried through my brain as I swarm out through the station and cram myself into packed cars. The problem with this book was that it validated this feeling without adding much to it. There are a few great moments -- as when, at the beginning, Sullivan compares the efficiency of a rat poison bait station to fast food restaurants -- but not much that's revelatory. Still, if you're interested in vermin or in New York City social history, I do recommend reading this book. It took me awhile to get through because I like to read while I'm eating, and that just wasn't an option here.... still, it was great on the subway. Rats is, despite my whining, enjoyable, informative, and not a waste of time at all.

[B. Rule · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book both frustrating and pointless. While there were a handful of interesting factoids and anecdotes, I learned next to nothing about rats. About half of the book is him saying "I was getting ready to go look at rats" and the last half is his extremely superficial observations of rats in an alley. (They like to eat! They run along walls! He can maybe, MAYBE, recognize a single rat after months and months of observations!) There is a weird part where he gives up on any effort at narrative consistency and just includes a bullet point list of things he did once in Milwaukee. The flow is really disjointed. The worst part of this book, though, is the insufferably pretentious writing style of the author, which periodically builds to a fever pitch. At one point he offers what are purportedly excerpts from the diary he kept while sitting in the alley. Within one hour, he has quoted Confucius, Milton, and a Latin aphorism, all to make weak jokes about rats. It took a supreme effort of will to read past that section without my head exploding in incredulity. It's pretty obvious that the author has some weird inferiority complex regarding writing about such a "low" topic and that he's compensating with overblown efforts to show he's "above" his subject. There are even cringeworthy sections where he describes himself justifying writing the book to people at cocktail parties. Dude, if you don't think your subject is inherently worthy, DON'T WRITE THE BOOK! The rats deserve better. The cover is the best part about this book, so drink that in and then move on.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was -- and I am choosing this word carefully, given the title -- delightful. Yes, it's about rats, and not cute rats that become pets. Robert Sullivan writes about the big brown rats with scary teeth that live in the alleys and sewers and garbage of New York City. It is spectacularly interesting, sometimes very funny, and, at times, deeply moving.

[Abigail Hilton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a rambling and ultimately disappointing book. Rats as a microcosm of human history should make a fascinating study, but...they don't. At least, not here. The author seems unable to decide what his book is really about. Is it about his daily observations of rats in an alley in New York? Is it about New York City itself with rats as a vehicle and focal point? Is it about human history in relation to rats? The author jumps randomly between these lines of thought, giving none of them serious attention. One would think that any of these three subjects could fill 220 pages, but instead, the book contains lots of padding - completely unrelated blow-by-blow descriptions of Sullivan's jaunts to various marginally rat-related places and people.

An excerpt:
"I was able to stop in the middle of Union Station and lean back against a wall and watch people as they streamed in and out of train-track exits and entrances, in and out of exits to Chicago's streets, of the entrance and exits to a restaurant also marked with signs indicating areas for ordering food to go versus to stay. I smelled food. I grabbed some."

Pages of this stuff, going nowhere, like a poor travel-writer describing his vacation.

In addition, the author is at pains to tell us that he does not like rats and thinks they're disgusting. He exhibits a strange squeamishness, even after spending many hours watching rats. As someone who does feel a level of compassion and interest in rats as animals, I found his attitude tiresome. He seemed concerned that the audience might actually think he liked his subjects.

If you're interested in rats, give this book a miss. If you're interested in minutia about New York City, you might find some jumping off points for further research.

[GoldGato · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compelling read about the way rats have adapted to life in New York City with some historical tidbits added in along the way. The cover art on the book is what got me, displaying Manhattan with a long rat and its tail making up most of the island. I’m not sure I really wanted to learn about rats before I picked this up, but once I started it was hard to put down.

When it is not gnawing or feeding on trash, the brown rat digs. Anywhere there is dirt in a city, brown rats are likely to be digging – in parks, in flowerbeds, in little dirt-poor backyards. They dig holes to enter buildings and to make nests. Rat nests can be in the floorboards of apartments, in the waste-stuffed corners of subway stations, in sewers, or beneath old furniture in basements.

Robert Sullivan didn’t just write a book from afar, safe in some suburban abode, using internet forays to gather ratty facts (which is the way I would have done it). No sir, he went into the very center of New York rat life, the headquarters so to speak, of ratdom. Crouched in alleys next to dumpsters, he braved the rat masses while also having to be aware of the human equivalents. Props to on-the-ground research. He begins the book by introducing the actual type of rat that is as much an immigrant as other New Yorkers: Rattus norvegicus, also known as the Norwegian or brown rat. I just refer to it as the City Rat. I call this rat an immigrant because New York used to be the home of Rattus rattus, also known as the black rat. The brown rat arrived during the American Revolution and gradually displaced the black rat via the brown rat’s own Manifest Destiny. In North America, the last state to be conquered by the brown rat was Montana, while the province of Alberta in Canada continues to wage war against rats to maintain its rat-free designation. In California, the brown rats nest in homes while the black rats prefer palm trees.

By braving dark alleys late nights, Sullivan was not only able to see rats during their favorite time of the day but also to see the types of food they prefer. While rats will eat just about anything, if given a choice, which they have in any major city with restaurants, they prefer some foods over others. Yes, rats are foodies. But food is just one chapter in this detailed book, as there are also chapters on fights, exterminators, traps, and…plague. The infamous plague outbreak in San Francisco in the early 1900s is covered here (brought by ship rats), a reminder that even when the public’s health and safety is put at risk, there are always “leaders” who will put self-interest and money before everything else (cough, cough, coronavirus).

This was such a fascinating read. Knock on wood, I’ve never experienced an abundance of rats or had a rat problem, but I used to see them traverse telephone lines as a highway system when I lived in Los Angeles. A local trap-neuter-release cat likes to catch them and lay them on my front door mat as some form of rent payment (she sleeps on my coyote-proof patio chairs). The last one she gave me was very, very long and the thought of disease meant it took me a bit to check whether it was fully dead. I must say that after finishing this book, I had a whole new respect for rats in general. Kudos to Mr. Sullivan for getting down-and-dirty and trying to see the world the way a rat would see it.

Book Season = Autumn (herding masses)

[Mini · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a weirdly enjoyable book.

If I had to guess why this book was written, I’d say it was to shine light on the real settlers of NYC, the rats and pests that were long before people. Rats are surprisingly important to the city’s history as the author did a good job of explaining. They’re everywhere- in poor, rich, and middle class areas.The great equalizers, rats have played a role in the growth and death of many NYC neighborhoods and beyond. One of the most interesting parts of the book to me was the chapter on the garbage riots of the 1970s and how rats became an important pawn to the union strikers asking for fair wages. Rats were also used as weapons (literally) in the Harlem tenant strikes in the 1960s and helped lead the city towards safer and cleaner housing for immigrant families. There’s a lot of history interwoven in the authors narrative and I liked the way he painted a picture of rats as citizens of the city alongside humans.

What I didn’t like was how he went overboard on romanticizing the rats. One of the last chapters is completely devoted to one rat, The Rat King, and the author watches him for days until one day he comes back and the big rat is dead. I’m glad that was one of the last chapters because it started making me question this man’s sanity.

It was a really interesting book and it made me curious about the “old history” of New York City and where I live. To paraphrase the rat man, there’s a lot going on under your feet if you’re curious enough to look at it.

[Natalie Kling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Urban nature writing. While researching rats, Sullivan also tells the story of the social history of the New York alley he becomes a fixture in. He becomes this fixture so the rats become comfortable with him there and they go about their business of running through restaurant garbage every night. He also attends exterminator conventions in the mid-west and is given access to the World Trade Center after 9/11 to find the rats are doing well and fine among all the death and destruction.

I found this book full of random and interesting information about rats and their place in this world. I was also entertained through the whole book and amazed that this guy's wife let him back in the house every night.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have two pet rats that I play with and watch endlessly, so I guess I could really identify with the author. They're such cunning, wily little guys. They were"rescued" from a feeder pet store for snake food. Although mine are the so-called "fancy" rats, one is brown and the other is black and look much more like common sewer rats.

That being said, I thought it was interesting how much rats have influenced and/or been part of the politics of NYC for many years.

Nice, easy read and not too science-y- almost more of an autobiography with rat info thrown in.

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was okay, for someone with no history/knowledge of rats and did all their research from a bench in a shady alley.

But I would have really loved to read some information from a real expert. I think reading the Wikipedia page would have covered more, to be honest.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rats are pretty gross. Not the pet rats you occasionally see in cages but full on wild, eating garbage, long tailed, with yellow teeth rats.
The latter is the subject of Robert Sullivan’s eye opening book about the pest everyone loves to hate.
Sullivan, for reasons not particularly clear to himself, decides to spend four seasons in a New York City alley observing rats in their daily habitat.
Along the way he traces the history of the alley from tenant strikes in the 1960’s to the origins of the American Revolution. These historical vignettes are mostly fairly interesting but the book really shines when it focuses on the rats.
For some reason, I share Sullivan’s fascination with universally despised but fascinating creatures. (for a good example of this I highly recommend Kelsi Nagy’s wonderful book “Trash Animals”)
Rats in particular are tough (it took double the amount of anesthetic that would have killed a small cat to knock out a 12 inch rat), clever and remarkably adept at surviving and adapting. Rarely straying far from the radius of their nests for food and with seemingly distinct food preferences (apparently peanut butter is universally loved by them while the rats Sullivan observed were often seen fighting of discarded chicken pot pies).
Rats are also notoriously difficult to trap in that they are highly sensitive to changes in their environment and are extremely cautious creatures. One such example made me chuckle a bit was some rats nests:

“have been found stuffed with the gnawed shavings of the wood-based, spring-loaded snap traps that are used in attempts to kill them.”

Yes, rats apparently have a sense of humor as well.
Toward the end of the book, Sullivan observes that rats in fact, are not unlike human’s in many ways in that:

“We are all a little like rats. We come and go. We are beaten down but we come back again. We live in colonies and we strike out on our own, or get forced out or starved out or are eaten up by our competition, by the biggest rats. We thrive in unlikely places, and devour…We are the rats whose population may boom, whose population may decline, who can survive where no other species could or would want to…With caution, we will flourish; without it we will not; we will starve and die and maybe kill each other, maybe not.”

Upon reflection, it’s difficult to argue otherwise.
While Sullivan does go out of his way to emphasize that he doesn’t find rats to be cute or likable in any way, he does grudgingly respect our similarities.

“We humans are always looking for a species to despise, especially since we can and do act so despicably ourselves. We shake our heads as rats overpopulate, fight over limited food supplies, and then go to war until the population is killed down, but then we proceed to follow the same battle plan.”

In the end, what we hate about rats is perhaps what we secretly despise and admire about ourselves.

[Taveri · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost gave this book a DNF after two chapters but it was an easy read with sometimes interesting information peripherally related to rats. There were tidbits about the Bubonic Plague in China, the Battle of Golden Hill, squalor living conditions in San Francisco, mania for native plants in Germany, Audubon, Thoreau's Walden, poisons, when Extermintaors began to be called Pest Control Operators (in 1936), and estimates of rat populations in NewYork City.

Sullivan, the author, suggests 250,000 is the reasonable estimate then goes on to mention an authority says there are a million rats on Riker Island. So Manhattan, some 400 time the size of Rikers has 1/4 the rats? I don't think so. Here is an article > https://www.google.com/amp/s/observer...

Sullivan notes there are 250 businesses doing rat control in NYC, the largest having 100 employees. Let's say they all did = 25,000 employees, each dispatching a conservative one rat a day (say in a 400 day year) = ten million rats gone - they wouldn't be in business long if there were only 250,000 to deal with.

Another thing that bothered me was that right near the beginning (page six) Sullivan advises he wasn't going to talk about fancy rats (pet rats and lab rats). Come-on-now a book about rats and he brings in antecdotes about China, history, Audubon, Walden, various legislations and he is going to leave out lab rats! I would have rather he spent his time comparing maze running times of white lab rats to black sewer rats than sitting in an alley watching rats burrow into garbage.

Enough of rats I am moving onto lobsters.

[miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

i started reading this book while i was working in the idaho desert without real barrier between myself and the surrounding environment (read:rodents)... after a few nights, i decided that the fact i was trying to avoid acknowledging the rats crawling on and around me as i tried to go to sleep wasn't the best time to be reading this book. this book acheives a laudable success in documenting the amazingly disgusting existence, habits and characteristics of rats, as it sets out to do, perhaps all too well. and the history presented is intriguing. i particularly love the scene, as i've explained to many, many people since reading it, about the underground rat fighting circuits staged in the back of seedy lower eastside taverns at the turn of the century. the image of men chasing and capturing rats in a makeshift ring, then with only their bare hands and bloody cheeks, breaking the rats' necks between their teeth can only be described as "AWESOME!"

[Jenna Los · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another great idea for a book that fell a bit flat. Sullivan spent a great deal of time sitting in an alley watching rats, but I don't think he really "discovered" all that much that wasn't already known. He mentions several scientists whose experiences would have been much more informative and interesting to read than this bit. For instance, one scientists takes rats off a street in Baltimore and then presents them with various bits of garbage to see which they prefer; Sullivan remarks that once the rats are in the garbage bags on his alley, he has no idea what they are doing and can only watch the bag ripple with their movements.

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rats by Robert Sullivan is a fascinating study of rats and their cohabitation with humans. One particularly interesting section was on rats and plague, which, as you may know, is spread to humans by the rat flea. Apparently the Japanese were the first to experiment with the use of plague as a biological weapon during WWII under the direction of General Shiro Ishii. He discovered that the best was to infect a city with plague was to fill clay bombs with infected fleas. An attack was successfully conducted against the Chinese city ofChangde. A clue that the outbreak was caused by humans rather than rats was that the rats began dying of plague weeks after the humans, a reverse of the normal situation.

General Ishii also practiced vivisection on live humans. He was never tried for war crimes, apparently having made a deal with the Americans who got copies of his notes and papers which formed the basis for the early American attempts at creating biological weapons. He retired a respected medical man.

The United States began experimenting with biological weapons in the early fifties and tested their weapon distribution methods on unsuspecting Americans. In one case, Navy planes sprayed the eastern Virginia coat with microbes similar to Anthrax but "thought to be harmless," and as late as 1966, soldiers dressed in civilian clothes dropped light bulbs filled with the microbes on the tracks in New York subways in order to measure how the microbes dispersed -- all without the knowledge of the public or Congress.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much like its subject, Sullivan's Rats refuses to be boxed into a single category, preferring to dart back and forth between microhistory, natural history, and personal essay in a charmingly discursive loop.

Sullivan's investigations into New York's least-loved inhabitants is part curiosity (an investigation into an Audubon painting of rats uncovers the artist's rat-hunting habits and spurs the author's own quest) and part opportunity (when in NYC...), and the desultory tone of this brief exploration (it tops out at 219 pages before endnotes) never really manages to impute any greater meaning to the venture than that, despite some half-hearted attempts to link the natures and fates of rats and men. Still, Rats is full of fascinating trivia and historical anecdote (rat fighting! Japanese bioweapons! the post 9/11 battle against rats!), if not a depth of scientific information regarding Rattus norvegicus.

Sullivan isn't a naturalist, and readers looking for a deep exploration of the biology and habits of rodentia should take a hard pass on Rats, which they would likely find frustratingly incomplete. As a tourguide, however, Sullivan excels, leading the reader through the maze of New York's neighborhoods and introducing their rodent inhabitants, contextualizing each with small bits of history. Should you choose to take the author's bait, Rats offers an entertaining look at ourselves and our rodent neighbors.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good book with a great cover by Cooper Grad Peter Sis (also did the Whale seen on the new trains as part of the Arts for Transit program). Ah, if only everyone judged this book by its cover it would have done even better. Unfortunatelyl some smart people (unlike me) read reviews first.

The author, a layman takes on studying rats in New York by repeatedly visiting an alley that I myself have previously reported to 311 for Rat issues. There are lots of strange tid bits of information but also lots of dead ends to his tirades. To publish a book the author has added chapters on Plagues and other grotesque things in other cities which don't directly play into his New York theme. This weakens the book and these chapters fall in at strange intervals. I feel the volume could have been published just as easily without them.

He has a newer book on the Meadowlands. Although Rats left me a bit disappointed, and the afterword, more annoyed than anything, I'll pick it up mainly because of the subject and also because it doesn't require me to think. This is a good book for reading on a packed subway when you don't have to focus and keeps you from being disgusted by the uglies that surround you.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining book - gives interesting details about the history of New York, and a study of urban rats' behaviour. Although the title is Rats, Sullivan is using them as a basis for a wider picture of New York (and other parts of America), its history and its inhabitants. I already know a bit about domestic rats, and like them, so wasn't as surprised (or disturbed) as other people might be, and have probably taken a different view of Sullivan's findings from his studies and experiments.
While easy to read, I found this book badly written in some places, with facile descriptions of people and their conversations. The author also can't stop describing two of his friends as a poet and an artist which got right on my nerves.

[Kena · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who is fascinated by the unlooked for causalities that affect human history and development, I liked reading about the parallel histories of humans and rats in NYC. The way the city’s geography, alcohol steeped underbelly and tenement past all had distinct rat relationships and were in turn shaped by the existence of the rat populations is awesome. While the overall tone was truly more of an ode to the rat, I was able to glean more about my new home and new epidemiologically relevant books to add to my to reading list not to mention a bunch of neat random facts to add to my trove.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you love rats? If so, then this book about city warriors with sharp teeth and quick wits is for you. Full of strange, wonderful and disgusting urban tales of rat life in the alleys, drainpipes and bathtubs of NYC.

From another Goodreads reviewer:

"I've always thought that they are completely misunderstood, but after reading this, I became a huge fan of rats; not merely a sympathizer but an all-out enthusiast! They're so cool! He explores where they live, their eating habits, their sex life (very active), and presents them as a reflection of human activity in the city."

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 4 out of 5]

A writer fascinated by both natural history and human history spends a year observing New York alley rats, combining observations about the rats, sifting through the natural history of rats and the hunting thereof, and sifting backward through the history of the alley through the history of Europeans in America.

This was less logical and more fun than I anticipated. The author talks about "his" rats, then jumps around to some other subject, often only tangentially connected to the supposed subject material.

If you're looking for a solid book about rats, maybe this isn't it. But if you're open to a cross-discipline study of history only loosely centered on rats, this is the book for you.

[Miguel Parrrra]

🪤✨🏴‍☠️

[Abigail · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this book. If you're looking for a book about rats, this isn't it. In fact it's a little bit, what's the word... Schizophrenic? It's the story of a forgotten back alley in New York City, the story of a forgotten battle at the beginning of the American Revolution, the story of a forgotten organizer for better housing, a history of pest control and a look at the pest control industry and a nature treatise that is less about nature and more about flowery language and quotes by Emerson and Thoreau.

The author spends a lot of time bragging (At least it felt that way to me) about spending a year observing rats in an alley, but honestly most of the book isn't really about his observations. It's about everyone else's and the way that rats have abstractly influenced things. The scientist in me got excited when the early chapters mention rat kings, and how there can be masses of rats whose tails are tangled together. I was like "wow I want to know more about this." But that is the only time it is mentioned in the book. (Not even the chapter titled "Rat King") mentions it.

The most interesting sections didn't happen until toward the end of the book. They were the chapters covering the spread of the bubonic plague in the middle ages and the pest control measures that were taken after 9/11. The latter was particularly interesting because that's not something people really think about. But other than that, meh.

I think this book had potential and maybe a certain type of person would find this interesting, but for me, it was mostly fluff. I didn't learn very much from reading this book and I felt like it focused less on rats and more on other things. Perhaps I should check out the book the author mentions by the "rat expert." It might be a little less disappointing.

[Alisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rodents roam in the underbelly of cities all over the world, and in this peculiar little book the author sets out to examine rodent life in perhaps one of the most prolific rat infested cities in America: New York. Out of morbid curiosity and the need for some inexpensive escapist airplane reading material, I decided to give this book a try. Face it, rats are disgusting disease ridden vermin so I recognize reading about them can evoke repulsion, fear, and disgust. But rather than focus exclusively on the urban rat life, the author weaves in stories of politics, architecture, labor unions, obscure historical figures, everyday people, and of course rodent control professionals. It turned out to be an interesting and fun diversion from the usual.

[Katherine MacKinnon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm tried, but just couldn't seem to get into this one. It didn't hold my attention like I thought it would. I skipped around, and didn't really go back to the parts I skipped over.

He does do a nice job of giving plenty of historic detail to NYC locations/people/events/institutions (including 9/11)--one thing I think my friend Michelle alluded to her review, but like her, I was left wanting on the rat behavior front. For us fieldworkers/natural historians, you gotta get in there with your subjects to really see what they are doing and why they are doing it! Even if it means going subterranean into a filthy underground tunnel system in gotham city...

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This highly informative and vastly entertaining book about the history and habitat of New York's rat population has chapters with titles like 'Where I Went to See Rats and Who Sent Me There,' 'Garbage,' 'Brute Neighbors,' and 'Rat King.'

But this book is not only about rat history, it's about New York history as well, and in addition to rats (Rattus norvegicus, in this case), we are also introduced to some very colorful and fascinating New York characters, both of present and of past.

You will never look at alley dumpsters the same way again.

[Иван Величков · Rating 2 out of 5]

Едно доказателство, че да се пише нехудожествена литература, също не е толкова лесно. Заглавието подвежда изключително много, въпреки амбицията на г-н Съливън да изкара цяла година, наблюдавайки плъховете в глуха улица, само на няколко преки от Уолстрийт, действителността се оказва съвсем друга и той прекарва повече време в библиотеката, издирвайки и засипвайки ни с ирелевантни факти и истории. Това не е книга за плъхове, оскъдната информация за вредителите вътре само дразни, а десетките исторически препратки и интервюта, макар и свързани с проблема, размиват и обезсмислят цялата книга. Ако трябва да я категоризирам като нещо – това е книга за Ню Йорк, точно това се е получило след авторовото безсилие. И то раздърпана и хаотична книга за Ню Йорк.
От четирите сезона, които решава да прекара в алеята, Съливън пропуска почти цялата пролет, лятото обикаля из други градове, есента падат кулите близнаци, само на три пресечки и алеята му е затворена, а зимата минава унищожител на вредители и избива плъховете му, толкова за наблюденията, които, там където ги имаше, бяха на ниво домашно на третокласник.
Другото адски дразнещо нещо беше любовта на автора към няколко американски „класици“ и постоянните му бездарни опити да копира стила им на писане. Щялото нещо засилваше абсурда почти до хумореска.
Все пак намерих няколко доста интересни неща вътре, за съжаление не за плъховете. И най-вече още повече започнах да уважавам „Крадецът на орхидеи“. Ако съпоставим двете една до друга виждаме един и същи модел на работа и огромната разлика в резултатите – разликата между шедьовър и посредственост.
Дигам звездичка, защото книгата става за нещо, ако някой се интересува от историята на Ню Йорк през годините, тук може да намери парченца доста ценна информация.

[Rebecca Russavage · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would like to say that I picked up this book with interest, thinking that if I lived in New York I should do my due diligence and come to know the local fauna. At that time, I thought of rats as relatively benign, like any other animal, simply with a bad reputation due to stories. So, wryly, I thought I’d read the nature writing of the city and walk away with an appreciation for the depth and nuance of rat life.

I was wrong; they are disgusting, disquieting demons. They can chew threw concrete and iron, they are everywhere, and you can never get rid of them. They carry disease, they are just plain bad.

The writing on this is classic long form journalism, more casual in places than I’ve come to expect from more recent examples of the same kind. It actually doesn’t do all it could, and there isn’t a lot of in-depth discussion about the nature or culture of rat colonies (probably because going near them I’d a BAD IDEA). But it delivers on the promise (does kind of lose the thread toward the end with some revolutionary war history).

[Noah Goats · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rats inhabit a world that is essentially the Upside Down from Stranger Things. They build their homes where we build ours, creating a dark and twisted mirror of our urban landscapes. They eat our same food, but mostly in a putrefying form. They build nests with materials we recognize, plastics and paper, but in their world these things are shredded and filthy. Their world is rife with poison, disease, and sometimes even cannibalism. And where their world rubs up against ours, things turn violent.

We have been waging war against rats for the whole of human history, but in his fascinating book Robert Sullivan focuses on one particularly bloody battleground: New York City. He tells us about his own personal observations of rats (he came night after night to watch the rats in one particularly rodent riddled alley) but also tells of many other epic events in history of rats, from the black death to the big garbage strike of 1968. And all of it is interesting.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

not as heavy on facts about rats as the title might lead you to believe, but a really enjoyable meander through the history of rats in new york city (and america). kind of like reading a well-written and well-researched account of someone's wikipedia spiral, which i mean in a very complimentary way.