Customer Reviews

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Alex Awards (Awards))

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Since moving to New York City 10 years ago, I have been as fascinated with rats as Robert Sullivan. Well, maybe not fascinated enough to sit with them each night for a year, but if I'd known him personally during his research phase, I would have been one of the people he describes who begged to go observing rats with him in Eden's Alley.

When I saw the ad for this book appear in the New Yorker magazine, I immediately ordered it from Amazon. Impatiently waiting for it to arrive, I read the first chapter in Colosseum Books with giddy eagerness. I was thinking of ever-so-mischeviously giving it as a birthday gift to my partner, a lifelong New Yorker and rat despiser whose skin crawls and/or body reacts at the mere utterance of the word Rat. But (1) the gift was really for me and (2) I couldn't wait that long to read it, so I told him about the book and how "funny" it would have been when he opened it and saw what was in front of him (he literally shuddered at the thought). It finally arrived and I tore into it like a rat into a garbage bag of rotting food.

The first chapter talks about how and why he came to write the book. Near the end, he says (I'm paraphrasing) "But enough about me. You're here to read about rats, so let's get right to it."

As promised, next comes chapter two, chock full of rat statistics and a potpourri of various rat information. Suddenly it was akin to going down the first hill of a roller coaster or seeing a rare scary film that actually scares you. It freaked me out -- I'm sure that my eyes were wide and my mouth was dropped while I was reading -- and I wondered if I was going to be able to stomach the entire book.

But then came the remaining chapters. In chapter three or four, I believe, there is a hair-raising and extremely engaging anecdote that he and two friends personally experienced involving a herd of rats in Theatre Alley. But soon, as I gave progress reports to my partner about the experience of reading the book, I complained, "Too much of the book is not about rats."

That is my big grievance and for a book about rats, I'd say it's a fairly huge one. Apparently there is not enough about rats to fill a book, or at least Mr. Sullivan couldn't find enough. He explores various subjects that are often only indirectly rat-related, and will spend the bulk of a chapter giving the history of a person or situation. Very often I found myself wondering, "When or how is this going to tie into rats?"

Somewhere between halfway and three quarters of the way through the book, I finally got fed up and decided to skim the remaining pages until he said something about rats, at which point I would suddenly perk up. Look! Something about rats! Who would have thought? Then wading through several more pages of ratless historical context that I no longer subjected myself to, although sometimes he would trick me by throwing the word Rat in at random. I would nibble at what little morsel there was, or see that there was no nutritional value, and continue rummaging through the pages looking for more.

In the end I felt not only disappointed but cheated. Surely he could have filled a book twice this size with interesting rat information, anecdotes, tales of horror, first person accounts, etc. As it is, this book could be edited down to make an excellent article for The New Yorker, of which he is a frequent contributor (and which explains the well placed ad that hooked me). His running thesis of comparing rats to humans would also have been more convincing, funny and charming in magazine article form, but instead it becomes weak, thinly stretched and silly.

By the end, it is clear that he is grasping at anything trying to make his book interesting (and pretty much not succeeding). He more or less confesses that he's struggling to find a way to wrap up the book, which sure doesn't lend much confidence in him as an author. At least it's clear that he knew his writing was weak -- but why publish it before it was ready? He seems to be not untalented, just lazy. If it had to be padded for lack of substantial material, I would have preferred larger type and at least a few pictures, or a complete reformatting, a makeover: leave the interesting stuff in, throw the irrelevant stuff out, make the first letter of the first sentence of each chapter take up half the page, with little rat nibblings along the edge of said letter. Anything!

If you're still intrigued enough with rats to read it -- as I probably would be even after reading this critique -- at least don't waste your money on it. Get it from a library, read it in a bookstore, or wait for it to come out in paperback. And remember -- it's okay to skip the endless paragraphs and pages that aren't about rats; you're not missing a thing.

I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, the author's writing got in the way of what seems like a fascinating subject. Like other reviewers, I put the book down because I couldn't handle the stilted prose any longer. The book got one and one-half stars because I eventually picked it back up and plodded through because there were just enough interesting anecdotes to make it worth my while.
A prime example of my problem with Sullivan is on page 106. He spends a page talking about travelling with a group of exterminators. He sets up the scenario-this place is filled with rats, monster rats leaving two inch droppings. What's going to happen? Here's the payoff: "Something darted down, raced to the floor, where it stopped and looked right at him. IT WAS A BIG RAT." (Caps mine) That's it. Story over. If my 6th graders wrote a sentence like that, I'd give them the paper back. This is only one of many examples of the cringe-worthy writing encountered in the book. You've got to sort through too many rat droppings to make the experience enjoyable.

I have rarely found a more poorly-written book on such an interesting subject. Darn shame, as I (like other reviewers below) really wanted to like this book due to its subject.

The author does not move himself to the background. This book is not about rats so much as the author's adventures as he learns about rats. Rats are interesting, Robert Sullivan is less so.

The book is full of distracting misspellings ('They' for 'The' for example) and nonstandard capitalization ('Edens alley' for 'Edens' Alley' throughout). Each page has a half dozen places that brings the reader out of the story and back into the real world.

Further, the author is unable to write in a linear fashion. His description of of the alley is a jumble. I read the entire book and still cannot make a mental map of the place.

All in all, the subject deserves a better treatment than it receives here. An interesting, readable book on the urban rat remains to be written.

I am amazed at the good press that Rats received. Public Radio interviews, reviews in the major mags. Seemed like a must read. What a bust. There is very little about Rats in this book---not more than a few pages. If you are interested in obscure New York History (which is not even slightly connected to rats) then this is the book for you. The book continues to get great reviews, even in this forum. I must have missed something.

Author Robert Sullivan spent many nights over the course of a year observing the nocturnal goings-on--rat-watching, in other words--in an L-shaped alley (actually the intersection of two alleys, Ryders Alley and Edens Alley) in Manhattan, just blocks away from Wall Street and City Hall and the site of the World Trade Center. (Sullivan had been trying to trap a rat in his alley in the early morning of September 11th, 2001.) The alley he selected is bounded by a Chinese restaurant on one side and an Irish pub on the other, so that its greasy-slick cobblestones are awash nightly in edible garbage of both ethnic varieties, palatable to aficionados of either type. The alley is, in short, the perfect place to raise children.

Rats, as it happens, have a lot of children to raise. Among the skin-crawlingly fascinating bits of information Sullivan provides in his highly readable paean to the Rattus norvegicus, or brown rat, is that both male and female rats can have sex twenty times a day. "If they are not eating, then rats are usually having sex. Most likely, if you are in New York while you are reading this sentence or even in any other major city in America, then you are in proximity to two or more rats having sex." Nor is their copulation unproductive: "One rat's nest can turn into a rat colony of fifty rats in six months. One pair of rats has the potential of 15,000 descendants in a year."

Sullivan's observations on rats in general and on the rats in his alley in particular are interspersed with rat-related asides. He includes in his book, for example, chapters on New York's rat-motivated rent strikes in the 1960s and the rat fights of the 19th century, in which single dogs--and more rarely men--were pitted against scores of rats at a time for the amusement of a human audience. Some of Sullivan's tangents are more interesting than others, and readers will differ in their preferences. (The anecdotes of rat-hardened exterminators or urine baths as precaution against the Black Death? There is something here for every taste.) And Sullivan sometimes gets carried away with his poeticizing of the rat's experience and relationship to man. (I mean, they're just rats.) The book as a whole, however, is a delightful look at a rarely-considered world that is, often quite literally, right beneath our feet.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

I wanted to like this book. Witht so much prepress hype and such an intriguing subject matter, I couldn't wait to scurry home with a copy. What a let down. Three times I tried to engage in the book and three times I put it down.

It's rare indeed that I give up on a book before finishing it, especially when it is about one of my favorite subjects. With Rats: Observations..., however, after struggling through the first two chapters, I closed it for good. I found the writing clumsy and awkward and peppered with the occasional mistake. It is doubtful, for example, that a rat can `repeal' an attack as mentioned on page 9; repel, perhaps, but not repeal.

Although this immediately set a difficult tone, I pressed on, though with grave reservations. A dozen pages later, however, I identified a second problem and one that proved too much: the author confuses his fascination with the subject matter as reason enough for readers to be fascinated. It is a fatal flaw. Rats ARE fascinating, but less fascinating is the author's preoccupation with himself. I wanted to read about rats, not about an author writing about why he writes about rats. And doing it poorly! The truth is, I don't really care how he came to be intrigued; in fact, his nostalgic journeys into the halls of his own memories and the constant reminders to the reader that he was writing about rats fixed him as a looming presence in my mind and blotted out the real subject of the book: RAT! It was so distracting that I couldn't move forward.

When I read books about natural behavior, etc, I look for something like Ravens in Winter, by Heinrich, which separates observer from observed and - drawing upon his expertise, reams of data, and discrete information presented in a thoughtful manner - actually teaches me something and leaves me wanting more. Rat: Observations..., on the other hand, is little more than a rambling diary entry, a rat blog.

Other books I have read about rats have been far more successful. More Cunning Than Man by Hendrickson, for example, while often lurid, is highly entertaining and immensely readable. The Story of Rats, by Barnett and Barnett, a slim volume, is packed with facts and feels like a book.

Rats: Observations... seems like an overly long term paper from a self-infatuated high school student chasing a solid 3.0 grade point.

This book belongs in the dumpster, along with the title rats.

Rats. Most people stay clear from these nocturnal creatures that creep around city alleys eating garbage, most people that is except Robert Sullivan who has dedicated a year studying the Rattus norvegicus, or the brown rat, in New York City. In an attempt to find out more about these mammals that live in such close proximity to urban dwellers he embarks on a journey to unravel the mystery of the brown rat that is often escaping extermination by humans. Scouting out potential alleys to study in Manhattan he finds Edens Alley, a cobblestone alley in the back of several restaurants and other businesses which house dozens of rats that feast on the garbage and slimy liquids. Sitting on a small chair and armed with notepad and night-vision binoculars Sullivan takes detailed notes in the fashion of a biological scientist.

Aside from his own observations Sullivan delves into the literature of rats in New York City and individuals who are intimately involved with rats. As a result of his research he arrives at many interesting conclusions. Most attention to rats throughout the history of the city is focused on the conflict between man and rat. Various exterminators that Sullivan has interviewed have revealed the various methods of rat eradication. What I found most interesting was how the brown rat was at times an integral part of history such as the rat battle of Rykers Island in 1915 and the history of illegal rat fighting during the 19th century. Sullivan also succeeds in exposing some well-known rat myths that have survived for decades.

As a result of his utilization of several research sources Sullivan created a well-rounded expose of the brown rat in New York City. The tone and style is much like a nature study. Not many people would endure sitting in stinking alleys amidst rotting garbage for a year, yet it was clear that Sullivan has his own skirmishes with rats. He never hides his own fears and reservations while studying Edens Alley.

I've often ventured in alleys throughout my neighborhood in Chicago and there are bright yellow rat warning signs that are posted on some telephone poles, yet I have never seen a rat myself. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough? Maybe if I look a little harder the brown rat would make an appearance? I wonder...