Summary and Reviews of Rats by Robert Sullivan

Rats by Robert Sullivan

Rats

Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

by Robert Sullivan
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • First Published:
  • Apr 1, 2004, 256 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Apr 2005, 256 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of the most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant book of the season.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled little alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants—by observing the rat.

Rats live in the world precisely where humans do; they survive on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. While dispensing gruesomely fascinating rat facts and strangely entertaining rat-stories—everyone has one, it turns out—Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits nightly in the streamlike flow of garbage and searches for fabled rat-kings, sets out to trap a rat, and eventually travels to the Midwest to learn about rats in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities of America. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win tenants basic rights, Sullivan looks deeper and deeper into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses—its herd-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.

Did you know?

  • 26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats, 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused, and rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world’s food supply each year. The rat has been called the world’s most destructive mammal—other than man.
  • Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats a year: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.

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Reviews

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I could fill pages with anecdotes from this book but instead I encourage you to go and read the very extensive excerpt at BookBrowse for yourself. The excerpt is unique to BookBrowse and I guarantee you'll come away with lots of wonderful facts to send shivers down your friends' spines for years to come!..continued

Full Review (217 words)

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Beyond the Book



Rat Facts

  • 26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats.
  • 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused.
  • Rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world’s food supply each year.
  • The rat has been called the world's most destructive mammal—other than man.
  • Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats a year: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.
  • Of the estimated 25-35 million animals used in research experiments in the USA every year, about 95% are birds or rodents. 
  • Rats cannot vomit.

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Read-Alikes

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If you liked Rats, try these:

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    The Beekeeper's Lament

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    The honey bee is a willing conscript, a working wonder, an unseen and crucial link in America's agricultural industry. But never before has its survival been so unclear - and the future of our food supply so acutely challenged.

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