Skip to main content

Rats: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants – Robert Sullivan ****

In Meadowlands, Robert Sullivan brought us an entertaining tour of the largely ignored wild lands out the outskirts of New York. In Rats, he does the same same, not so much for an ignored location as an unwanted co-resident: the New York rat.
Sullivan’s style is to immerse himself in the subject, sometimes to an extent that many would consider obsessive. Night after night he visits a New York alleyway and watches the rat nightlife as the inhabitants of the dark side of the Big Apple pick their way amongst the ample discards of the restaurants that back onto the alley.
Along the way you will learn a lot (sometimes more than you want to know) about the rat and its relationship to human beings. And, this being Sullivan, you will also learn about a whole variety of things that spin off at a tangent from the topic of rats. You might be amazed to discover that plague, the same disease that caused such disasters in the middle ages, is not only still in existence, but is carried by wild animals in the US today. You might be surprised to learn of a nearly forgotten key character of the US revolutionary war, who was responsible for the first battle in the conflict, which took place on one of Sullivan’s rat sites. You will meet the exterminators and pest control operatives who have a lot of respect for the rat. And, if you enjoy Sullivan’s sometimes poetic, always warm narrative style, you will have a great time (and become something of a rat expert in your own right along the way).
After a time, Sullivan becomes fascinated by a large rat hole in his pet alley, which descends a huge distance into the basement, ironically, of the union of pest controllers. This subject, combining as it does the wry humour of the location of the hole, and Sullivan’s ability to enthuse about something few others could find interesting – and to make it something worth reading – is brilliant.
You have to admire the effort that went into this book. Sullivan’s methods are delightfully haphazard, but he really throws himself into the subject, never seeming to worry about the human dangers of spending many hours in dark New York alleyways (though he does occasionally worry about the rats a little). It’s a fascinating read, and though the subject may occasionally make your skin crawl, it’s highly recommended.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - Henry Gee *****

In writing this book, Henry Gee had a lot to live up to. His earlier title  The Accidental Species was a superbly readable and fascinating description of the evolutionary process leading to Homo sapiens . It seemed hard to beat - but he has succeeded with what is inevitably going to be described as a tour-de-force. As is promised on the cover, we are taken through nearly 4.6 billion years of life on Earth (actually rather more, as I'll cover below). It's a mark of Gee's skill that what could have ended up feeling like an interminable list of different organisms comes across instead as something of a pager turner. This is helped by the structuring - within those promised twelve chapters everything is divided up into handy bite-sized chunks. And although there certainly are very many species mentioned as we pass through the years, rather than feeling overwhelming, Gee's friendly prose and careful timing made the approach come across as natural and organic.  There was a w
Post a Comment
Read more

Michael D. Gordin - Four Way Interview

Michael D. Gordin is a historian of modern science and a professor at Princeton University, with particular interests in the physical sciences and in science in Russia and the Soviet Union. He is the author of six books, ranging from the periodic table to early nuclear weapons to the history of scientific languages. His most recent book is On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford University Press). Why history of science? The history of science grabbed me long before I knew that there were actual historians of science out there. I entered college committed to becoming a physicist, drawn in by the deep intellectual puzzles of entropy, quantum theory, and relativity. When I started taking courses, I came to understand that what really interested me about those puzzles were not so much their solutions — still replete with paradoxes — but rather the rich debates and even the dead-ends that scientists had taken to trying to resolve them. At first, I thought this fell under
Post a Comment
Read more

Regeneration - Paul Hawken **

This is a really big book. I don't mean big in the sense of important, but physically enormous for what it is - it's roughly the size of a children's annual, though a lot thicker. Interestingly, the format appears to be a Paul Hawken speciality - he did it with his previous title, Drawdown ,  though that was far less glossy. Paul Hawken's aim is to put forward a solution to climate change driven from humans rather than from the science. The tag line on the back of the book reads 'The climate crisis is not at science problem. It is a human problem.' And that itself is a problem. It's not that climate change isn't a human problem, but rather that it's both a human problem and a science problem - requiring human and science-based solutions. But the approach taken in this book is anything but scientific. It's a bit like saying the Covid-19 pandemic is a human problem, not a science problem. The pandemic is indeed a human problem, but if we'd tr
Post a Comment
Read more