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69 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rats, Sure, But Mostly Humans, April 19, 2004
Last year when I visited New York City I went running in Central Park, and the very first squirrel I saw was no squirrel at all, but a rat. According to Robert Sullivan, this would have been a good sign of the prosperity of the colony from which that rat had emerged. Rats go out at night, usually, and one edging out during the day means that the colony is pushing out beyond its usual boundaries. Sullivan has made a hobby out of rat-watching, and has written a peculiar and fascinating book about his adventures with his own rat pack, _Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants_ (Bloomsbury). It isn't only (or even mostly) about his observed colony in an alley a few blocks away from Wall Street, but about city rats in general and their history of living with us. Because of this, Rats isn't really about rats, but about the humans who have imported them and given them garbage to live on and then have been annoyed when they flourish and stupefied when they refuse eradication. Sullivan found a cobblestone passageway near City Hall called (note the irony) Edens Alley. His fascination for it was founded on the rats' fascination for the provided food, bags of garbage from a market and two restaurants. He spent night after night in the alley, with night-vision glasses and a folding stool. Nights spent there, he spent days doing research, which has lead to some surprising facts; since rats are important to us as pests, there has been a great deal of research done on them, much of it practical and some of it less so. For instance, rats can become immune to poison; even the first anticoagulant medications that were put into bait no longer work in many places, so using them just gives the rats a free meal. Rats are not limited to being pests; they also have been entertainment. In the middle of the nineteenth century, you could go to Kit Burns's Sportsman's Hall to see rat fights. They have played their roles in the unionization of the sanitation workers, and in the civil rights struggle. It is surprising at first to find that the World Trade Center plays a large role in this book. Sullivan talks to an exterminator who says he isn't an exterminator; he is a "pest control manager," reflecting the realistic view that rats will never be exterminated, but might be controlled from time to time, and even excluded from some areas. He had the contract for the WTC after the first bombing in 1993. Office workers evacuated the building, but they left the food they had out on every story to the delight of the rats. "We did top to bottom," he says of the rat clean-up. When the towers fell in 2001, there had been restaurants in the buildings, and restaurants nearby with food out which had to be abandoned, but not by the rats. It was impossible to do any rodent-proofing; the rats could come and go as they pleased. But one firm put out thousands of bait stations, and with good reason. When the technicians descended into the dust-filled lower levels of the foundations, they could see the tracks of thousands of rats which were tracing paths through the dust. The fall of the towers meant that Sullivan could not get into his alley to do more observations for a while, but by the time he did, the rats were back. This is a surprise-filled book of odd facts, strange personalities, and an eccentric narrator, who reacted to the return of his rats after the crisis by being filled with hope. If the rats are back, then the city is returning to its normal operation.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Almost perfect, October 29, 2004
Robert Sullivan relates his experiences as he delves into rats, with the focus being on the role that rats play in history and modern culture rather than dwelling on the nuances of rat behavior. He spends nights in a forgotten alleyway in New York, watching the rats as they emerge from their burrows to take advantage of the local restaurant waste. He spends time with exterminators (or "pest control specialists," as the industry leaders prefer), whether they work for small companies or large ones. And, apparently, he spends time at the library, digging up historical information that is at times so obscure that you wonder how he ever found it as it relates to his subject.
But Sullivan's book, peppered with literary quotes from the likes of Thoreau and Emerson, is ultimately less about rats and more about people. The rats are a fascinating hook, and every time a rodent skitters across the page, Sullivan invites us to squirm along with him. But more often, the reader is treated to quirky episodes in American history, in which the rats play some sort of role.
The black plague, the era of Gangs of New York, the American Revolution, the labor movement, and anti-Chinese sentiments at the turn of the century are just some of the subjects of Sullivan's stories, and he tells them all with a master's flair.
The Good and the Bad:
This is one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, edging out Hillenbrandt's Seabiscuit, and rivaling Kurlansky's Cod and the works of Bill Bryson. Sullivan knows how to tell an interesting story, and he has chosen a subject which rivets our attention no matter how it is presented. Putting the two elements together leads to a lot of compulsive page-turning.
Sullivan has that rare ability to reach deep into the history books and pull out the most engaging anecdotes, and yet find the connection to his story that merits the inclusion.
He also possesses the rare ability to insert himself into the story without dwelling on himself. While much of the book involves his personal interactions with the world, he never strays into the grandstanding that so many authors seem to find impossible to resist.
The book is mostly tangents, and there are footnotes that lead to tangents from the tangents, and endnotes that add yet another layer of side stories. But that's okay, because this is a journey that is far more pleasurable than any destination could be.
If I had to pick a nit about this one (and I like to present a little criticism on everything I read), I would say that I was surprised that there weren't more personal stories about people who aren't related to the rat industry, and their dealings with rats. He relates the rat story of an acquaintance who finds a rat in his bathroom, and it is one of the most entertaining sections in the book. I can't help but think that there are other stories out there that would have been worthy of inclusion.
Similarly, I would have liked to have learned a little more about the rats themselves, as pertains to their social structure and other areas of interest from a naturalist perspective. For example, he mentions a couple of times that a starving rat colony will begin to cannibalize itself, but there's no in-depth description of this phenomenon.
These are small concerns compared to the overall level of success that the book enjoyed. You know a book is good when you don't think anything should be taken out of it; you just want more and more. I'm definitely going to go look up other works by Sullivan now that I've been introduced to his writing.
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33 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like 20 New Yorker articles thrown together, December 20, 2006
This is a curious book. To start with, it is short. Without the Notes section, it is about 220 pages. There is no index or photographs or illustrations. The text has the feel of a random selection of magazine articles thrown together. There is an attempt to hold the whole thing together with the author's own personal observations of rats in an alley in lower Manhattan, but the author tends to spend more time discussing what he was wearing or drinking than about the actual rats in the alley. I am fairly certain that you could rearrange many of the chapters in virtually any order and the book would not significantly change. The writing style is occasionally humorous but for the most part seems like an attempt to be erudite rather than an actual success.
As to what you will actually learn about rats, there is very little here. You will learn more by going to Wikipedia, and the writing there is no worse. Many of his "facts" are prefaced by, "According to one study...", "By one estimate...", "One rat expert theorizes...". This might not be too bad if the source of these "facts" were cited but they aren't so there is no way to verify any of the information provided. And when an author is making fairly outrageous claims such as that one-third of the world's food supply is eaten by rats, the reader would like some support other than just the author's word. Also, the author tells us early on that there are only about 400,000 rats in New York but then he interviews an "expert" that he admires who tells us that there are millions of rats living deep under the city who never come to the surface. Is there any support for this? Is it 400,000 or millions? And even when he gets his facts right he gets them wrong. For example, the author writes about the rats link to the Black Death but fails to note that the Brown rat that is in the city is not the rat that carries plague and in fact, probably can't carry plague. The rat of the Black Death was the Black Rat which is not the rat the author is writing about.
Which brings up the side trips on the journey. Almost anyone in New York who has something to do with rats is a potential target for a chapter. Many of these people are not the least bit interesting and the claims they make are unsupported by any evidence but the author simply reports them as fact. His writing fails to cover any subject in any depth. He writes a chapter about John DeLury, for example, who was the head of the sanitation worker's union in the 1970's with very little detail beyond what you would expect in a typical obituary. And then he ends the short chapter with excitement that a friend of a friend is a grandson of DeLury. Ho-hum. He tries to interview people who might remember so-and-so who had some remote link to rats years ago but the interviews go nowhere. A typical response he gets is, "I didn't know him personally but I understand that people spoke highly of him." Excuse me? Why is this even worth writing down? Is the author that desperate to pad his book?
Overall the book does not educate the reader about rats, does not provide much in the way of historical detail, and barely entertains. I would not recommend that anyone waste their time on it.
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