High lexile nonfiction about the history of rats in New York City. Witty and informative. I don't like rats any more or less than I did before reading the book.

I think rats are interesting and I'm happy to know a little more about them but I don't much care for Sullivan's writing so reading this felt a bit like a chore.

an entertaining investigation of the ratness of it all

Rats by Robert Sullivan is a fascinating study of rats and their cohabitation with humans. One particularly interesting section was on rats and plague, which, as you may know, is spread to humans by the rat flea. Apparently the Japanese were the first to experiment with the use of plague as a biological weapon during WWII under the direction of General Shiro Ishii. He discovered that the best was to infect a city with plague was to fill clay bombs with infected fleas. An attack was successfully conducted against the Chinese city ofChangde. A clue that the outbreak was caused by humans rather than rats was that the rats began dying of plague weeks after the humans, a reverse of the normal situation.

General Ishii also practiced vivisection on live humans. He was never tried for war crimes, apparently having made a deal with the Americans who got copies of his notes and papers which formed the basis for the early American attempts at creating biological weapons. He retired a respected medical man.

The United States began experimenting with biological weapons in the early fifties and tested their weapon distribution methods on unsuspecting Americans. In one case, Navy planes sprayed the eastern Virginia coat with microbes similar to Anthrax but "thought to be harmless," and as late as 1966, soldiers dressed in civilian clothes dropped light bulbs filled with the microbes on the tracks in New York subways in order to measure how the microbes dispersed -- all without the knowledge of the public or Congress.

This book was certainly intriguing and went a lot more in depth than a simple “guide to rats”. Using rats as a vehicle we got into the nooks of a lot of different worlds and issues and that was nice. Has a few chapters and pieces that sucked eggs though, and reading it aloud to a colleague we both had a laugh a time or two about crayon on construction paper style writing.

So far it is pretty good. I especially liked the description of a rat bite on a child's sleepy face.

This is a fast and interesting read. Not only does the author include his own "scientific study and observation" but the book includes historical details of rats and people of New York. An intriguing look at the symbiotic relationship between humans and the critter they like least, rats.

A funny, informative account of New York’s history with rats, and a fascinating travelogue and history of New York itself.

Rats are pretty gross. Not the pet rats you occasionally see in cages but full on wild, eating garbage, long tailed, with yellow teeth rats.
The latter is the subject of Robert Sullivan’s eye opening book about the pest everyone loves to hate.
Sullivan, for reasons not particularly clear to himself, decides to spend four seasons in a New York City alley observing rats in their daily habitat.
Along the way he traces the history of the alley from tenant strikes in the 1960’s to the origins of the American Revolution. These historical vignettes are mostly fairly interesting but the book really shines when it focuses on the rats.
For some reason, I share Sullivan’s fascination with universally despised but fascinating creatures. (for a good example of this I highly recommend Kelsi Nagy’s wonderful book “Trash Animals”)
Rats in particular are tough (it took double the amount of anesthetic that would have killed a small cat to knock out a 12 inch rat), clever and remarkably adept at surviving and adapting. Rarely straying far from the radius of their nests for food and with seemingly distinct food preferences (apparently peanut butter is universally loved by them while the rats Sullivan observed were often seen fighting of discarded chicken pot pies).
Rats are also notoriously difficult to trap in that they are highly sensitive to changes in their environment and are extremely cautious creatures. One such example made me chuckle a bit was some rats nests:

“have been found stuffed with the gnawed shavings of the wood-based, spring-loaded snap traps that are used in attempts to kill them.”

Yes, rats apparently have a sense of humor as well.
Toward the end of the book, Sullivan observes that rats in fact, are not unlike human’s in many ways in that:

“We are all a little like rats. We come and go. We are beaten down but we come back again. We live in colonies and we strike out on our own, or get forced out or starved out or are eaten up by our competition, by the biggest rats. We thrive in unlikely places, and devour…We are the rats whose population may boom, whose population may decline, who can survive where no other species could or would want to…With caution, we will flourish; without it we will not; we will starve and die and maybe kill each other, maybe not.”

Upon reflection, it’s difficult to argue otherwise.
While Sullivan does go out of his way to emphasize that he doesn’t find rats to be cute or likable in any way, he does grudgingly respect our similarities.

“We humans are always looking for a species to despise, especially since we can and do act so despicably ourselves. We shake our heads as rats overpopulate, fight over limited food supplies, and then go to war until the population is killed down, but then we proceed to follow the same battle plan.”

In the end, what we hate about rats is perhaps what we secretly despise and admire about ourselves.

i started reading this book while i was working in the idaho desert without real barrier between myself and the surrounding environment (read:rodents)... after a few nights, i decided that the fact i was trying to avoid acknowledging the rats crawling on and around me as i tried to go to sleep wasn't the best time to be reading this book. this book acheives a laudable success in documenting the amazingly disgusting existence, habits and characteristics of rats, as it sets out to do, perhaps all too well. and the history presented is intriguing. i particularly love the scene, as i've explained to many, many people since reading it, about the underground rat fighting circuits staged in the back of seedy lower eastside taverns at the turn of the century. the image of men chasing and capturing rats in a makeshift ring, then with only their bare hands and bloody cheeks, breaking the rats' necks between their teeth can only be described as "AWESOME!"

28 March 2004 RATS: OBSERVATIONS ON THE HISTORY & HABITAT OF THE CITY'S MOST UNWANTED INHABITANTS by Robert Sullivan, Bloomsbury, April 2004, ISBN 1-58234-385-3

" 'The goose did what?' asked Mrs. Arable, gazing at her daughter with a queer, worried look.
" 'Told Templeton she didn't want the egg any more,' repeated Fern.
" 'Who is Templeton?' asked Mrs. Arable.
" 'He's the rat,' replied Fern. 'None of us like him much.' "
--CHARLOTTE'S WEB by E.B. White

The first time I discovered the pleasure of sharing saliva with a girl, we were by ourselves inside the shed in my family's suburban back yard. That shed had originally been built as a chicken coop for the bunch I'd incubated, candled, and hatched out as a Scouting project. The chickens had been evicted a couple of years earlier, after one of their nocturnal escapes had occasioned a predawn Sunday morning telephone call to Mom and Dad from an irate neighbor--a disabled W.W.II vet who owned the local (believe-it-or-not)Chicken Delight--upon whose front lawn our rooster was announcing the upcoming solar event.

During those years we raised chickens in Commack, I never observed a rat in the neighborhood, no less in my chicken coop. This, despite my using the chickens to compost our food scraps as well as boxes of rotting vegetables I'd be given by the kindly proprietor of the local farm stand who suddenly became the new owner of my wayward chickens, thanks to that telephone call.

" 'AAAAAAAAAH, A RAT! OH MY GOD! DIOS MIO! There's a rat in the bed!'
"I'd just fallen asleep when I heard Mami screaming. I jumped up, grabbed the staple gun and a paint roller, and ran to her.
" 'Iris, stay back!' Freddy stood in the doorway to the living room with his baseball bat. Mami was hopping around like the floor was on fire. 'It's okay, Ma! Calm down! Relax!' He rushed in and poked the bat into the corners of the pullout sofa. 'Which way'd he go?'
" 'I don't know!' Mami climbed up on a chair. 'All I know, he was huge! He was making the whole bed shake, he was so big.' "
--JUST ASK IRIS by Lucy Frank

Back in 1986, when I purchased my farm here in Sebastopol, I inherited dozens and dozens of "wild" chickens. Unpenned and multiplying fruitfully, they roosted in the eves of the barn, in the tangled wisteria bushes out front, and on top of my old blue Datsun wagon. For months I crept out at night with a flashlight to grab them, cage them, and sell them to the local farm supply store.

I also inherited some rats. When I again kept chickens for a few years, while my children were preschoolers, the rats were constantly making off with the eggs and the chickens' feed. I've forever since needed to be diligent about keeping the goats' grain in tightly covered metal containers. My late golden retriever, Annie Banannie, used to catch and chomp the rats sometimes, but our current canines apparently aren't as talented.

" 'Las ratas, son el pan nuestro de cada dia,' the man said. 'The rats are part of everyday life.' "

I haven't observed any rats out there in a while, but I know from the evidence of chewed up stuff and the old nests I periodically discover that they are still out there. I certainly have yet to see the charm in rats.

But I've now acquired an abundance of intriguing, entertaining, and downright scary facts and anecdotes about the history, physiology, and behavior of rats, along with the history and behavior of humans in dealing with these pests. All this, thanks to reading Robert Sullivan's RATS: OBSERVATIONS ON THE HISTORY & HABITAT OF THE CITY'S MOST UNWANTED INHABITANTS.

"Rats succeed while under constant siege because they have an astounding rate of reproduction. 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 of two or more rats having sex. Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day, and a male rat will have sex with as many female rats as possible--according to one report, a dominant male rat may mate with up to twenty female rats in just six hours."

The author spent many nights over the course of a year closely observing the rat population of a particular alley in lower Manhattan. The alley was named after Medcef Eden, a prosperous Revolutionary-era friend of Aaron Burr whose descendants (Eden's descendants, that is) used to own the farm that was eventually developed into Times Square. From the continual inclusion of detailed tangential information, such as the two hundred year evolution of the cobblestoned, brick-sided, urine-reeking alley that Sullivan chose as his base for nocturnal rat-watching, it is obvious that the author spent his days locating and poring over the thousands of carefully noted references from which he has mined multitudes of fascinating facts and stories that make you constantly want to interrupt the nearest person and share what you've just read.

"One of the most amazing rat skirmishes ever happened downtown in 1979, when a woman was attacked by a large pack of rats.
"It happened on a summer night, just after nine o'clock. The woman was described by the witnesses as being in her thirties. She was on Ann Street, right near the entrance to Theater Alley. Judging from the various accounts, she seems to have been approached by the rats as she was walking toward her car. She also seems to have noticed the rats coming near her, their paws skittering on the street. Witnesses said the rats swarmed around the woman. One climbed her leg and appeared to bite her. The woman screamed. A man nearby ran to help the woman, taking off his jacket and waving it in an attempt to scare the rats away. The man told police that the rats appeared undeterred by anything he did, and in a second they began to climb up his coat. Seeing this, the man ran to a phone and called the police. By now, the woman was in a 'state of hysteria' according to another witness. She staggered to her car, which was parked a few yards away. The rats followed her. She got in, closed the door. Now the rats were climbing on her car. She was screaming when she drove away. The woman was gone by the time the police arrived, but the rats were still there, scurrying through the street and into Theater Alley and into their nests in a lot on Ann Street, just around the corner."

" That's better,' said Joan, rubbing him dry. 'Now you be a good boy and eat with the spoon.'
" 'Yes, I will,' he said, nodding.
" 'I'm surprised they didn't teach you manners when you were a page boy,' she said.
" 'I was a rat,' he said.
" 'Oh, well, rats don't have manners. Boys do,' she told him."
--I WAS A RAT! by Philip Pullman

Tales of City government and union leaders whose names I recall from my New York childhood, famous and infamous figures of NYC eras past, and nearly anonymous characters whose work has been vital to the understanding of and/or battling against these varmints are all tucked into this rat's nest of information.

"Today, [Juan] Colon is remembered as the only exterminator ever to tie a rodent to a rope and walk it back to the [NYC Rodent Control] bureau office, eager to show off its impressive size. 'I was young and crazy,' Colon once said.

No, I still don't see the charm of rats. And it won't make me sleep any better having learned such err...interesting facts such as that there are more plague-infected rodents in North America today than existed in Europe during the infamous Black Plague. But there is no question that Robert Sullivan's RATS trapped me within its cover. (And a gorgeous Peter Sis cover it is to boot!)

Richie Partington, MLIS
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Yay rats! I've always had an affection for rats... I think it's the idea that they live in a secret underground/between walls world that I will never be able to see. I've always thought that they are completely misunderstood, but after reading this, I became a huge fan of rats; not merely a sympathizer but an all-out enthusiast! They're so cool! He explores where they live, their eating habits, their sex life (very active), and presents them as a reflection of human activity in the city. And there are some really funny stories as well.