Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

I found this book to be a fascinating exploration of how rats live with man. It's not really about *just* rats, but is much more wide-ranging. The tone is chatty, and despite the title, it's more the story of the author studying the rats than it is of his actual observations. In many ways it reminded me of an old favorite,  Never Cry Wolf , which I read and re-read growing up.There is considerable 'ick factor' in many of the descriptions, and after reading this, you will not want to go into any of New York's dark alleys. But the author's observations, while not strictly scientific, are very interesting, and he made a definite attempt to learn as much as he could about the creatures he was studying, and the people who lived - sometimes by choice, usually not - in close proximity to them. On the other hand, there were lots of very interesting bits of rat lore, history, myth, as well as odd facts about the animals themselves.My biggest complaint with this book is that the author frequently went off on a tangent and would spend almost an entire chapter discussing something only slightly related to the rats or his study. The first couple of times were OK, but after that it began to seem that he was losing the thread of his story, and it became annoying and the relevance to the point of the book wasn't obvious. I think this was however, a matter of degree rather than quantity - the tangents would have been more acceptable if they were shorter and more to the point.With the full understanding that rats are NOT to everyone's taste - even between the pages of a book - I would recommend this book as very interesting and fairly light reading. Curious minds will enjoy learning about the alleys of NYC and their inhabitants.Note on Kindle formatting: Only OK - it was obvious that this book was scanned to make the digital edition. While most of the 'usual' OCR errors were caught and corrected, there were still quite a few that slipped through. The one that struck me most forcibly was a capital H used when there should have been 2 l's or 'lt', or the Roman numberal II (as in "World War H"). The errors were frequent enough to be noticeable, but not to the point where they actually impacted reading. The majority were 'real' words, just not the 'right' word, which made it a little harder to figure out what was being said.

Sullivan has done a superb job at covering the history, biology and lore of the NYC rats. Something the new Rat Czar should have on her shelf if she doesn't already.

Author Robert Sullivan spent many nights over the course of a year observing the nocturnal goings-on--rat-watching, in other words--in an L-shaped alley (actually the intersection of two alleys, Ryders Alley and Edens Alley) in Manhattan, just blocks away from Wall Street and City Hall and the site of the World Trade Center. (Sullivan had been trying to trap a rat in his alley in the early morning of September 11th, 2001.) The alley he selected is bounded by a Chinese restaurant on one side and an Irish pub on the other, so that its greasy-slick cobblestones are awash nightly in edible garbage of both ethnic varieties, palatable to aficionados of either type. The alley is, in short, the perfect place to raise children.Rats, as it happens, have a lot of children to raise. Among the skin-crawlingly fascinating bits of information Sullivan provides in his highly readable paean to the Rattus norvegicus, or brown rat, is that both male and female rats can have sex twenty times a day. "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 to two or more rats having sex." Nor is their copulation unproductive: "One rat's nest can turn into a rat colony of fifty rats in six months. One pair of rats has the potential of 15,000 descendants in a year."Sullivan's observations on rats in general and on the rats in his alley in particular are interspersed with rat-related asides. He includes in his book, for example, chapters on New York's rat-motivated rent strikes in the 1960s and the rat fights of the 19th century, in which single dogs--and more rarely men--were pitted against scores of rats at a time for the amusement of a human audience. Some of Sullivan's tangents are more interesting than others, and readers will differ in their preferences. (The anecdotes of rat-hardened exterminators or urine baths as precaution against the Black Death? There is something here for every taste.) And Sullivan sometimes gets carried away with his poeticizing of the rat's experience and relationship to man. (I mean, they're just rats.) The book as a whole, however, is a delightful look at a rarely-considered world that is, often quite literally, right beneath our feet.Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

My friend loves this book. Tbf, she is a rat enthuisiast but, hey, know your audience, I suppose.Good show.

This was another part of my journey through books about New York. A absolutely brilliant book....informative, fascinating, funny, revealing. The story of rats, their human neighbors and the city that breeds them is as intertwined as a bunch o' rat tails. you get it.....

Great book. Came quickly well-packed. Thank you.

Very little about rats. Lots about himself and some apparently (but actually not) interesting characters from New York.Self indulgent. Better title would be "Myself and Other New York Inhabitants (Human)" - then the right people would buy it and the reviews would be better

A fantastic book! Amazingly 'un-put-downable' and full of great American history. I now look in alleys constantly and will probably never sleep again. But it was worth it!!