rats rats rats...good lord, rats! there is no way i ever would have even picked up this book. who in the world cares to know more about the 8 million rats who live under our feet, in some cases kept at bay by mere inches of drywall? however, something happened on the 34th street herald square subway platform recently that made me "notice" rats in a new and curious way. it was your typical rat scene. a half dozen or so rats scurrying around the tracks, their long tails dragging in the murky subway water, people looking away with disgust after staring and pointing for about a minute. the rats ran fast, their bodies pressed along the walls or rails, popping in and out of holes, investigating the detritus scattered throughout the station. i stared at them with mild intrigue, pacing the platform impatiently for the train that was unusually slow to arrive when i saw something that startled me and stopped me in my tracks (pardon that weak pun). a simple, mid-sized rat was poking around the trash when he (she? it?) came upon a white plastic bag. instead of burrowing under the bag with his nose to investigate for potential morsels, said rat took his right paw, grabbed the edge of the bag, lifted it high above his ratty head and "peeked" underneath. after scanning the space for moment, he then put the bag back down when it was clear there was nothing worth pursuing. the movement was so shockingly humanlike that it forever changed the lens with which i see these city rats....and so, i bought the book, hoping to get a closer look at these bag lifting rodents and what makes them tick.

Robert Sullivan is earnest, clever and well intentioned. He sets out to observe rats in their native alleyways in lower Manhattan and is a determined urban explorer who returns night after night, notebook in hand, sometimes with buddies, to record and share the behavior and lifestyle of our dreaded island mates. He weaves in historical anecdotes and data, interviews with pest exterminators and homeless people, both of whom naturally have a far different relationship with the rat community. We learn that rats never stray more than 60 feet from their nests, each nest boasts about 100 rats and rats only go where there is food. He takes us back to early 19th century New York where rat fighting was common at the pubs and "rat catchers" made about ten cents a catch to keep the sport going. The fast facts and interesting sound bites are plenty but what RATS is sorely missing is an anchor, a reason, the main moment. Sullivan never delves into our psychological relationship with rats, the myths, the fears and yet the pets that sit on people's shoulders. He also doesn't travel underground so the rat observations are repetitive and familiar, extended versions of what we see on the subway.

All said, Sullivan is worth the read and the subject matter and writing are solid, albeit just wrapped in a big gimmick.

I was really eager to read this book , it seemd so interesting but i was wrong to be excited about it. This book was very disappointing altogether. There was nothing in it about rats that couldnt be found on wikipedia or just commonly known about rats. The author was more inclined to swing off in tangents about the history of New York city and his chapers on pest control were just plain boring.

I kept waiting to be told something really interestng, but it never happened. Dissapointing, not reccomended unless u just feel like annoying yourself.

A fascinating read, you have to live the raw enthusiasm for the subject! However, I would warn that the last half of the book does drag on quite a bit and I struggled with it at times.

Yesterday when I came out of my building, I was confronted by a giant rat standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up at me. Yeah, right at me. It was still light out, and the thing just stood there stolidly gazing up, unafraid, just, yeah, looking at me! See, my front yard is infested with large, fearless rats. They live in a hole in the dirt and frolic in the garbage. The hole's recently been plugged up, but the rats don't seem to care; as this book reminds us, they're adaptable animals. I've sat on my stoop on a fine spring day, watching the big rats romp in the yard, climbing into bags of trash and writhing joyously around inside, like the cartoon rat Templeton in that memorable fair scene in the Charlotte's Web movie.

Anyway, this rat yesterday clearly wanted something, and I took its keenly intimidating, beady-eyed stare to mean that it was telling me that I'd better review this book. Since I'm currently on the bus to Philadelphia (INTERNET! On the BUS! I'm like a RAT in a FILTHY REEKING GARBAGE BAG!!!), there's no time like the present.

Okay, so when I was in the first grade, my across-the-street frenemy Lindsay Kagawa had a pet rat named Twinkie. Twinkie was what this book taught me is called a "fancy rat." She was little and delicate and black and white, and she lived in a cage in Lindsay's room. Lindsay and I both loved her rat, and we'd write letters to one another every day, letters that featured drawings of Twinkie engaged in a number of activities (e.g., getting married, doing ballet, holding balloons), letters that were hand delivered into mailboxes and adorned with pencil-drawn stamps featuring portraits of -- who else? -- Twinkie the rat.

In the ninth grade, my friend Isabel Douglass had a fancy rat of her own, named Selene (she also had a zine called Selene, after the rat). Isabel was a forward-thinking young lady, and as you might guess based on the silk-screened "Rent is Theft" tee shirt she wore every day, Selene had no cage, living instead on Isabel's very lovely, if not totally cleanly, person. I remember this being an issue when we'd go eat hot and sour soup at Long Life Veggie House, because restaurant people tended to become upset when Selene poked out, so it was a constant struggle for Isabel to keep her fancy rat concealed at these times. I think Selene eventually ran away from home (as Isabel herself had) to join her gutterpunk rat boyfriend who lived in a sewer. She was replaced by another pet rat -- I want to say Travis? -- but I'm not sure what happened to him. I think he eventually ran off too, to help build up the rat population of Berkeley. If rats don't have cages, they tend to run off. Also, rats are very sensual creatures, according to this book, anyway. Those rats have needs!

Anyway, at the time I looked upon both Twinkie and Selene as adorable little comrades, much to the horror and revulsion of my mother, a woman born and bred -- not incidentally -- on the island of Manhattan. My mother was thoroughly disgusted by the idea of rats as pets, and her hatred of rodents was something I never understood, either as a naive and anthropomorphizing child, or as an annoying anti-anthrocentric teenager. "Rats are cute, mom!" I said. "Rabbits are rodents. What makes rats grosser than rabbits? It doesn't make any sense why you hate them so much!"

"Ugh," she shuddered, and I rolled my eyes.

Then I moved to New York.... and now I get it. Well, I do and I don't. The sight and even the thought of rats is now one of the most disgusting things that I can imagine. When I see them running in the subway tracks or down the street, I watch, transfixed, but I'm also nauseated and repulsed. There is just something so -- revolting, so disturbing about these creatures. Vermin! Ugh!! The larger they are, the more disgusting and scary; the closer they get, the more horrifying, and the idea of large numbers of rats, of bands and tribes, of rats en masse, swarming and scurrying.... UGHH!! Every night when I come home I cross the front yard gingerly, terrified I'll step on one of them. To me rats now represent danger and disease, but there is something more there, deep seated and primal, something Jungian about my feelings towards them that I don't understand. Yeah, rats are gross -- they are filthy animals, they do eat garbage, they do live in sewers, they do bite people, they spread the plague and other diseases (a public health expert in this book calls them "germ elevators") -- but their repulsiveness still seems like more than the sum of their parts. I was hoping this book would explain this to me, or even better, that it would demystify my fear and loathing of the rat. I hoped that I could go back to the days of Twinkie and Selene and become, if not open to having them crawl all over my body, at least more comfortable sharing my space with these creatures who are, quite clearly, not going anywhere anytime soon.

But this book didn't do that. Let's be clear: Rats is a good book, and I learned a lot from it and found it thoroughly enjoyable. But precisely because it was good, I hold it to a higher standard, and I really think Rats needed one more serious, tough, grueling revision in order to become truly great and do some transcendent form of justice to its fascinating subject. Still, it's a worthwhile read, and contains some great New York City history, as well as interesting information about rats.

The premise of the book is that the author decides to spend a year watching rats in an alley in lower Manhattan, while also hanging out with exterminators and researching the history of tenant activism, bubonic plague, Revolutionary War-era Manhattan, and other kinds of obviously and not-so-obviously rat-related information. One thing I loved about this was that both alleys where Sullivan does his rat watching were right around the corner from my office, so I got to check out the locations he was discussing (though I didn't go at night, which is prime rat-watching time). My excitement about the neighborhood sort of made it okay that his rat watching didn't ultimately seem to have much of a point.

Sullivan's book isn't bad, but a lot stuff in here, like the rat watching, is interesting but never seems to go anywhere. I did get annoyed because he started with this sort of Transcendentalist, naturalist conceit about his rat-watching, which would've been great except it took him way too long to get over the silliness or oddness of his project. He should've just thrown himself into it and been like, "I am Thoreau, and this alley is my Walden," but he compromises that idea when halfway through the book he's still exclaiming, "OMG! I can't believe I'm watching rats, this is so crazy!" I know this seems like a minor complaint, but I wanted him to take it seriously from the beginning, and stop congratulating himself for the quirkiness of his idea. Sullivan does eventually give himself over to his topic, but for me it took him a little too long to do it, and once he got there, he didn't quite go far enough in pulling it all together. I think he was trying to say that people are really a lot like rats, but he didn't make that explicit enough, in a way that explained or illuminated our animosity towards them. He came really close, and started to get there at several points, especially at the end, but the book never quite came together and changed the way I thought about rats in a profound way. That's why I say this book needed one more thorough revision to go from great to good -- the elements were all there, but it didn't ever come together as amazingly as I wanted it to.

It did, however, make me think quite a lot about rats, something that's really been a problem because I've recently been running a lot, and seeing things move out of the corner of my eye has led to a lot of embarrassing screeching and sideways leaps into the air (it's always turned out to be a bird or a plastic bag -- knock wood). Rats were always on my mind while I was reading this, and I'm definitely more conscious now of their presence all around me, at all times -- ugh. I've always been grossed out by the heaps of garbage coating New York, especially during the summer, and I'm now even more disturbed by them. Gross! When we surround ourselves with garbage, we get the rats that we deserve....

Living in New York does make me feel like a rat, especially when I'm riding the train at rush hour. For years, that old Fear line about "rats in our cage" has scurried through my brain as I swarm out through the station and cram myself into packed cars. The problem with this book was that it validated this feeling without adding much to it. There are a few great moments -- as when, at the beginning, Sullivan compares the efficiency of a rat poison bait station to fast food restaurants -- but not much that's revelatory. Still, if you're interested in vermin or in New York City social history, I do recommend reading this book. It took me awhile to get through because I like to read while I'm eating, and that just wasn't an option here.... still, it was great on the subway. Rats is, despite my whining, enjoyable, informative, and not a waste of time at all.

This is a compelling read about the way rats have adapted to life in New York City with some historical tidbits added in along the way. The cover art on the book is what got me, displaying Manhattan with a long rat and its tail making up most of the island. I’m not sure I really wanted to learn about rats before I picked this up, but once I started it was hard to put down.

When it is not gnawing or feeding on trash, the brown rat digs. Anywhere there is dirt in a city, brown rats are likely to be digging – in parks, in flowerbeds, in little dirt-poor backyards. They dig holes to enter buildings and to make nests. Rat nests can be in the floorboards of apartments, in the waste-stuffed corners of subway stations, in sewers, or beneath old furniture in basements.

Robert Sullivan didn’t just write a book from afar, safe in some suburban abode, using internet forays to gather ratty facts (which is the way I would have done it). No sir, he went into the very center of New York rat life, the headquarters so to speak, of ratdom. Crouched in alleys next to dumpsters, he braved the rat masses while also having to be aware of the human equivalents. Props to on-the-ground research. He begins the book by introducing the actual type of rat that is as much an immigrant as other New Yorkers: Rattus norvegicus, also known as the Norwegian or brown rat. I just refer to it as the City Rat. I call this rat an immigrant because New York used to be the home of Rattus rattus, also known as the black rat. The brown rat arrived during the American Revolution and gradually displaced the black rat via the brown rat’s own Manifest Destiny. In North America, the last state to be conquered by the brown rat was Montana, while the province of Alberta in Canada continues to wage war against rats to maintain its rat-free designation. In California, the brown rats nest in homes while the black rats prefer palm trees.

By braving dark alleys late nights, Sullivan was not only able to see rats during their favorite time of the day but also to see the types of food they prefer. While rats will eat just about anything, if given a choice, which they have in any major city with restaurants, they prefer some foods over others. Yes, rats are foodies. But food is just one chapter in this detailed book, as there are also chapters on fights, exterminators, traps, and…plague. The infamous plague outbreak in San Francisco in the early 1900s is covered here (brought by ship rats), a reminder that even when the public’s health and safety is put at risk, there are always “leaders” who will put self-interest and money before everything else (cough, cough, coronavirus).

This was such a fascinating read. Knock on wood, I’ve never experienced an abundance of rats or had a rat problem, but I used to see them traverse telephone lines as a highway system when I lived in Los Angeles. A local trap-neuter-release cat likes to catch them and lay them on my front door mat as some form of rent payment (she sleeps on my coyote-proof patio chairs). The last one she gave me was very, very long and the thought of disease meant it took me a bit to check whether it was fully dead. I must say that after finishing this book, I had a whole new respect for rats in general. Kudos to Mr. Sullivan for getting down-and-dirty and trying to see the world the way a rat would see it.

Book Season = Autumn (herding masses)

Rats are all around.
They're filthy 'cause we're filthy.
We're a lot alike.

It was okay, for someone with no history/knowledge of rats and did all their research from a bench in a shady alley.

But I would have really loved to read some information from a real expert. I think reading the Wikipedia page would have covered more, to be honest.

This book was about so much more than rats; what was perhaps most surprising come book's-end was how profound it was; how far-reaching its scope; it was even a little moving.

The writing is lovely (Sullivan had a knack for artfully describing mounds of garbage in great and vivid detail). A line like: "To stand in an alley is to watch the city from its bowels, to feel life grumbling in its gut" is what made this book so special. Sullivan's enthusiasm for his subject keeps the reader engaged. The penultimate chapter aside (Sullivan lost me a bit there), this was an enjoyable and, most definitely, memorable reading experience.

As someone that has lived in rat-infested neighborhoods in New York and is interested in history in general, I really liked this book! The subtitle is a guide, I believe, to whether or not YOU will like this book. It's got some facts, but it is truly observational. The author places himself if the book in a way that allows you to see through his experience. Some chapters were like fever dreams, allowing you to glimpse a bit of how the author started to see anything he came across relative to rats. He grows an affinity for the history, people, and circumstances surrounding rats.

Rats is a bald "book proposal" project that never transcends the limitations of its genetics. We can imagine Sullivan telling his agent that he wants to spend a year watching rats in NYC while jotting down his thoughts and experiences. The agent sells the project with a phone call to Bloomsbury or something. Sullivan clearly approaches the project as a one year job - which is fine - we all gotta eat. But this could have been an incredible journey into an unknown and fascinating secret world - instead it's a dude who doesn't know shit about rats when he starts the project and at the end, knows a little more about rats and has managed to bore us with the story of how he acquired his limited knowledge. He even includes a chapter straight from his journal and then pads the tale with contemporary history from the time that the rattus norvegicus was introduced to the New World. . .I guess maybe in NYC - though I'm not convinced that anyone really knows. So it's kind of a crock. I think the book succeeds on the thin film of its premise - i.e. this was a book that needed to be written and was written in a passable way. He approaches a subject of which many of us have a morbid curiosity without rigor and without much of a point. He barely attempts to relieve us of our deep ignorance about the animal and chooses to hang brain with exterminators instead of scientists, who all tend to say the same shit about the rat. Like - OK - rats are smart. They have respect for them. What-the-fuck-ever.

There are a few anecdotes of mild interest, some half-ass city history - some of which has NOTHING to do with rats. . .even though he's trying to tie the human experience into the experience of rats. Yes we're like rats. . .they are a mirror of sorts into the condition of our world. Quite poetic and pat in its way but super cheap. The "rat race"? Have you ever heard of it? Oh shit. . .right. This book is overRATed. THAT was cheap of me but I bought this book so go to hell.

Another great idea for a book that fell a bit flat. Sullivan spent a great deal of time sitting in an alley watching rats, but I don't think he really "discovered" all that much that wasn't already known. He mentions several scientists whose experiences would have been much more informative and interesting to read than this bit. For instance, one scientists takes rats off a street in Baltimore and then presents them with various bits of garbage to see which they prefer; Sullivan remarks that once the rats are in the garbage bags on his alley, he has no idea what they are doing and can only watch the bag ripple with their movements.

Intriguing in the beginning, but lost me a little in the middle when the author delves deeply into tangential history. The author does attempt to gather accurate, objective information on Rattus norvegicus in the first few chapters, but nonetheless a couple of laughable "facts" do get through and are treated as truths.