After pointing out a host of facts about rats that are sure to make you start itching ('if you are in New York. Although many people have never seen a rat outside a pet store, Sullivan reminds us that they are our constant neighbors, staring out from dim corners and messy crevices with beady eyes and twitching whiskers.In this excellent narrative, Sullivan uses the brown rat as the vehicle for a labyrinthine history of the Big Apple. In personable, essayish chapters, New York's history is revealed to be particularly ratty, with tall tales about the rodents' disgusting accomplishments going back to the city's founding. But Sullivan's style is often less that of a nature writer than a historian. There are plenty of facts in the book to make your skin crawl, such as a description of the greasy skids rats leave on the paths they frequent, and a list of garbage items they prefer to eat. As in his previous books, Sullivan uses pointillist details rather than broad portraiture to paint his subject, and the details in Rats are devilish. Sullivan learned to appreciate the rodents during nocturnal stakeouts a night-vision scope helped him observe rats without scaring them. In his third book, Robert Sullivan leaves the wilds of the ( Meadowlands and the rough whaling waters of the Pacific Northwest to take up rat-watching in the alleys of New York City. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Sullivan's unusual and absorbing book earns a place alongside the classics of travel writing. He travels to a bizarre Midwestern conference on rats that brings together the leading experts on rat history, behaviour and control (did you know that one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year? that rats' teeth are harder than steel?) And he reveals the many ways rats' lives mirror those of humans. He meets the exterminators, garbage men, and civic activists who play their part in the centuries-old war between human city-dweller and wild city rat. Sullivan spends the year with a notebook and night-vision goggles, hunting for fabled ratkings, trapping a rat of his own, and trying (and failing) to conquer his own fear of rats.

He discovers a world almost nobody knows. Robert Sullivan - intrepid journalist, curious writer, fearful urban dweller - sets off to contemplate New York City and its lesser-known byways by observing the lowly rat.

Surprisingly funny and compulsively readable, Rats is an unlikely account of a year spent in a garbage-strewn alley in lower Manhattan.

Rats by robert sullivan