Identify Books To Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
| Original Title: | Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants |
| ISBN: | 1582344779 (ISBN13: 9781582344775) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | New York City, New York(United States) |
| Literary Awards: | ALA Alex Award (2005) |
Robert Sullivan
Paperback | Pages: 272 pages Rating: 3.72 | 3725 Users | 562 Reviews
Point About Books Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
| Title | : | Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants |
| Author | : | Robert Sullivan |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 272 pages |
| Published | : | April 11th 2005 by Bloomsbury USA (first published 2004) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. History. Science. Animals. Environment. Nature. New York. Microhistory |
Representaion Conducive To Books Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
New York Public Library Book for the TeenagerNew York Public Library Book to Remember
PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year
"Engaging...a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller.
Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. In Rats, the critically acclaimed bestseller, Robert Sullivan spends a year investigating a rat-infested alley just a few blocks away from Wall Street. 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.
Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herds-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.
With an all-new Afterword by the author
Rating About Books Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
Ratings: 3.72 From 3725 Users | 562 ReviewsDiscuss About Books Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
A writer fascinated by both natural history and human history spends a year observing New York alley rats, combining observations about the rats, sifting through the natural history of rats and the hunting thereof, and sifting backward through the history of the alley through the history of Europeans in America. This was less logical and more fun than I anticipated. The author talks about "his" rats, then jumps around to some other subject, often only tangentially connected to the supposedRats inhabit a world that is essentially the Upside Down from Stranger Things. They build their homes where we build ours, creating a dark and twisted mirror of our urban landscapes. They eat our same food, but mostly in a putrefying form. They build nests with materials we recognize, plastics and paper, but in their world these things are shredded and filthy. Their world is rife with poison, disease, and sometimes even cannibalism. And where their world rubs up against ours, things turn
This is a rambling and ultimately disappointing book. Rats as a microcosm of human history should make a fascinating study, but...they don't. At least, not here. The author seems unable to decide what his book is really about. Is it about his daily observations of rats in an alley in New York? Is it about New York City itself with rats as a vehicle and focal point? Is it about human history in relation to rats? The author jumps randomly between these lines of thought, giving none of them serious
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
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
Do you love rats? If so, then this book about city warriors with sharp teeth and quick wits is for you. Full of strange, wonderful and disgusting urban tales of rat life in the alleys, drainpipes and bathtubs of NYC. From another Goodreads reviewer:"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
There are rats in my apartment. I see them all the time, both night and day. While working with my computer, they would climb in the nearby pile of books. Sometimes a big one would pass right in front of me at my table, perhaps unaware that I'm just there right in front of him. So I read this book.It's not so much about rats, however, than about people who had been, or are, involved with rats. And since rats are known carriers of diseases, plagues were also discussed. Rats, the book said, have ,
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