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.

Other reviewers have complained that this book isn't so much about rats as it is about the city of New York itself, and that criticism is very true. This isn't so much about rats as a species, although it does comment a decent amount about their behavior, as it is about the people who deal with rats on a daily basis and how the rat lives alongside us. This is a history of sanitation workers, exterminators, and doctors and how each in turn respond to the invasion of the Norwegian Rat into their cities - this is how the rat is essentially a part of the city itself, a microcosm of human civilization through burrows and rat pits and the perceptions we all hold about the strange species.

Go into this book expecting social history more than commentary about rats. Go in expecting a history of extermination, complete with commentary about how it should, but isn't changing. Go in expecting a history of the lower echelon of society, how people live alongside rats, what it means, and how dealing with rats often forces us to deal with the less desirable aspects of our own society. Expect all of this written in a poetic language that wants to be Thoreau but never quite reaches that point. Nonetheless, it makes you think, and that's a good thing, isn't it?

I liked reading this book, although it wasn't quite what I was after. Once I settled in to accept it for what it was, however, I was pleasantly surprised. This is a good book that teaches us a different way of looking at things, and it is a book that accepts the rat for what it is: a rat. It doesn't put other expectations upon or it dress it up in hyperbole. This book respects them for what they are, praises them for what they excel at, an marvels at their survival and adaptability. Nevertheless, this book still acknowledges the harm they can do, but does so without prejudice and explains why it is they often do what they do.

We can learn a lot from rats when we stop to think about them, and this book encourages us to do just that.

My second book by Robert Sullivan. (Both were gifts from a dear friend with impeccable taste… obviously!)

He has his (unique) lane and knows how to spin a completely interesting and strange and intriguing yarn you didn’t think you’d want to read but totally glad you did afterwards. (And I found myself quoting from his book all the time with all the trivia and tidbits I picked up.)

How many people can pull off the trick of discussing an exterminator conference which dovetails into early American history revolving around once-important figures most of us never heard of before and then right back to ‘The Rat King’ and then a detour about 9/11?

(Is it asking too much for Sullivan to team up with Mary Roach because THAT will be the most oddball and amazing book ever written, for sure.)

“’It’s a very interesting world, isn’t it, the lower echelon?’”

“Las ratas, son el pan nuestro de cada dia”

“But mate these rats did, and repeatedly, which is a thing about male rates – they have been known to mate with a female rate long after she is interested in mating, sometimes after the female is dead.”

There are rats in my apartment. I see them all the time, both night and day. While working with my computer, they would climb in the nearby pile of books. Sometimes a big one would pass right in front of me at my table, perhaps unaware that I'm just there right in front of him. So I read this book.

It's not so much about rats, however, than about people who had been, or are, involved with rats. And since rats are known carriers of diseases, plagues were also discussed.

Rats, the book said, have , the fear of the new. So what I did when I bought a rat trap [the kind that imprisons a rat uninjured:] was to place it first in one corner for many days, often putting food outside of it. The trick is to remove its newness to the rat. After that, I set it up, put freshly cooked peanuts inside and, bingo, got a very large black rat. Method of execution: pour boiling water upon the shrieking creature while trapped inside the cage.

Rats' most favorite garbage food according to the book[the first one being the most favorite:]: scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, cooked corn kernels, cooked potatoes, cooked oatmeal, cooked sweet potatoes, white bread, raw corn on the cob, raw beef with bones, raw sweet potatoes, raw beef without bones, corned beef hash, fried chicken, bananas, cooked carrots. Of course, the book discussed rats in New York. So these are New York garbage food. Here in my place, the rats loved peanuts and peanut butter [cheese too!:].

Two times already, rats were trapped inside a pail half-filled with water. I left them to drown. Do you know they can last for more than two days swimming in the pail before finally drowning? The book did not mention this, so it got only 3 stars from me.

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.

I really enjoyed this book. Its a book about rats, but its also a book about New York, exterminators, and all these historical figures that Robert Sullivan connects to the story of rats. I loved his writing style, it read like a light conversation and included some great tangents that somehow always made it back to the topic of rats. The transparency of how strange this whole project was for him was matched with this notion that we are similar to rats in so many ways- and I thoroughly enjoyed this juxtaposition. I do want to check out more books by the author, but I think I've read enough about rats for this lifetime so I'm glad this is his only book on the subject.

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.

In this book are more facts about rats that you can poke at with a stick. There's some great anecdotes (historical and recent) as well as profiles of colorful people that travel in rattish circles.

Unfortunately, the author has a contrived overexcited attitude he goes on his rat-ventures and it makes the second half of the book a struggle. His observations devolve into a weird fake Victorian romantic praise for rat life (or the simpler life, channeling Thoreau). His writing is fragmented for this reason and for many strange associations that he makes. Sometimes, rats running around in an alley are just rats running around in an alley. I can be convinced if they are more than that, but I certainly wasn't by this book. Still worth picking up for all the rat-facts and especially for the gruesome chapter on rat fighting!

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.

There are essentially three threads to this book.

The first is about rats, obviously: this is what I was expecting to read about, and it held my interest throughout.

Second is a connection Sullivan makes between rats and people, using an allusion to Emerson's essay on "Representative Men" to spin histories of what he considers the important "Unrepresentative Men" of history connected to rats and rat behavior, sometimes tenuously: this took me a while to get into, but ultimately I was happy to get these profiles of men I would not have otherwise heard of, and in the end these sections do drive home the point he makes that rats are like a shadow species to humans in many ways.

The third is the story of Sullivan himself observing rats in New York City: this seems like a compelling idea in theory, but Sullivan proves an insufferable host. Unfortunately, the first thread composes a relatively small part of the book; the second, much more; while the third is frustratingly omnipresent. I would have been thrilled with the book if these proportions were reversed--as is, I'd recommend it with a caveat.

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.

You probably didn't know that when a member of a rat colony dies, the survivors often gather in a circle around the corpse as if mourning. The reason you didn't know that is because it isn't true.

Rats mate for life, and before mating, they perform an elaborate ritual that includes standing on their hind feet, stomach to stomach, and reaching upward. That isn't true, either.

Actually, rats are every bit as repulsive as you think.