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.

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.

I love rats. I have pet rats. I do research with rats, both lab and field studies. I enjoy the topic of "rats." That being said, I loved this book probably for the reasons that many people do not.

Rats is not a natural historians approach to the study of Rattus, instead it is one journalist's foray into the rat shaped history of New York. This means the bulk of the content is not talking about the specifics of wild rat behavior and habitat, but rather how the interaction of rats with humans was a key component in the political developments of New York. If anything, it is a commentary on the close bond that rats and humans share, and will probably always share.

Rats has a lot of interesting stories and tidbits about human-rat run-ins. I found it particularly fascinating that the founder of the SPCA, Henry Bergh, started his journey of protecting animals by attacking and denouncing the practice of ratting. Yes, a lot of the stories are about exterminating (or at least attempting to exterminate) rats, but that unfortunately is the nature of the relationship between city dwelling rats and humans. However, I do not think it takes away from the information provided. Also, Sullivan's occasional stories about his "own" alley rats really lends a more personal feel to the book while providing a close-up portrait of the subject.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book for the historical stories revolving around rats and would recommend it to others who enjoy the subject of rats but with a human political and historical flare.

P.S. Rats are not "heroes" in the book, they are presented as important, but slightly disgusting cohabitants. Many people in the book respect rats because of their tenacity, but overall, most people hate rats.

All time, so funny, so many anecdotes, will be returning

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.

This was so charming and I learned so much. Kind of the perfect type of book.

Unfortunately not as many Rat Facts as I thought I’d get and sometimes I didn’t know why I was still reading. But an absurd-enough premise and written with enough humor to keep me tagging along to Sullivan’s journeys in the rat-infested alley.

The author himself gets one star, the subject material helps him out and bumps it up to two. His "wax poetics" go nowhere, the narrative follows the storyline structure of a high school short story spread over a couple hundred pages, and he somehow makes the topic of rats (which is a fascinating topic) only "moderately interesting," instead of a can't-put-down-er. The subject matter and asides are all composed of interesting stories (the picture of hundreds of rat traps laid around ground zero after 9/11, and the realization that this would be necessary is fascinating), but the author is just not a great writer.

That said, at no point was I "bored" with the book. I just realized that a very, very interesting thing (rats and how they relate to cities and their stratification) was reduced to one hipster walking around NYC with his "poet friend" (mentioned about 12-15 times) watching rats.

Still, read this if the subject of rats and cities intrigues you.

This mainly feels like a New Yorker article that went on far too long. It meanders and maunders all over the place, and many of the chapters appear to be completely irrelevant filler.

Still, the second chapter, simply describing the biology of the city rat, is filled with the kind of fun factoids that I wanted when I picked up the book. Rats usually live about a year, can have sex up to twenty times a day, gestate over just twenty-one days, and their nibbling causes about a fourth of all cable and wire breaks in the city. So far so good. Also, Sullivan explains that the 1 rat per human inhabitant rule so often repeated is a myth emerging out of a 1909 British report that calculated one rat per rural acre (in reality there are probably about 250,000 rats for New York's 8 million inhabitants). Also, apparently the "Rat King" myth has some truth to it: rats are hierarchal pack animals, with one rat often getting more rat ladies than others, and some rats do get their tails tangled up together so they can't move (then their rat brethren bring back food to feed them!)

Overall, however, most of the stories here have little or nothing to do with New York city rats. Sullivan describes the Harlem rent strikes led by Jesse Gray in the 1960s, and the sanitation workers strike led by John DeLury in the same decade. He then goes on to the Black Death, the 1774 fight against British soldiers in New York led by Isaac Sears, and the San Francisco quarantine scare of 1901. Some of these stories are certainly interesting, but they are better told elsewhere. Also, his personal observations of a series of rats' nests in Eden Alley add almost nothing to the story.

So if you want a few weird stories and a couple of rat factoids this should satisfy that craving, but a 20 page New Yorker article could have done the same.

this book reads like one of those overlong yelp reviews filled with extraneous personal details. except it's about rats. kind of.

What fun! I loved the author's overall tone, the city history, and the way he somehow balanced repulsion, curiosity, and narrative. There were a few instances where I felt semi-facts/interviews/recollections made the writing unclear, but that's a small price to pay. (Do I have any concept of how many rats are in NYC? No. But I know how quickly they breed and how hard they are to kill, but also that they're killed a lot? Yes! The lack of finality on many, many issues was part of the charm.) A really enjoyable reading experience about vermin and their ratty history.

Rats are the best animals to exist. Why are they unwanted?