Customer Reviews

Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher After 25 Years' Experience

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've said for a long time that for any but the most menial career fields, it is interesting to hear someone experienced talk about the problems and challenges of job. This book bears that out.

The book is extremely short, and I was a bit disappointed to see that it isn't the accounts of specific days on the job, dealing with strange characters or particular quirky circumstances that I'd expected. Instead this is mostly a "how to" book on how to catch rats according to best practices of mid-19th Century England. It is well-written and readable, unlike many how-to books. There are some bits of color, such as describing the author's confrontation with a company board over the price he wanted to charge--He finally offered a five pound note to any of the gentlemen of the board who would spend the next evening with him crawling around under the floorboard of the building placing rat traps and removing them. Nobody took him up on his offer.

I read this book on my Kindle--Note that the formatting on the one dollar edition is awful, the line length is too long for the Kindle and you alternate between a full-length line on the Kindle followed by a short stub of a line that fills out the original line length. The book is short enough that this can be put up with for the hour or so it will take you to read the book.

An amusing and interesting short diversion, but not enormously entertaining or meaningful.

I picked this up at Oliver Cromwell's house on a visit to the UK a few years ago; but just got around to reading it. It is far more interesting that I thought it would be. This book gives a historical perspective that I never realized even existed and is partially biographical, partly practical, and comes across as a statement by a man who really cared about his profession. There are grizzly portions to get though, but I think anyone interested in the social history of the industrial age will get a lot out of this. Enjoy.

Enjoyable book. I read it on a plane ride and thought it was a worthy read.