Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted InhabitantsNew York Public Library Book for the Teenager New 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 |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 5 | |
Where I Went to See Rats and Who Sent Me There | 15 |
Edens Alley | 27 |
Brute Neighbors | 34 |
Summer | 49 |
Unrepresented Man | 59 |
Food | 69 |
Trapping | 130 |
Plague | 136 |
Winter | 145 |
Plague in America | 153 |
Catching | 164 |
Rat King | 184 |
A Golden Hill | 194 |
Spring | 213 |
Fights | 76 |
Garbage | 86 |
Exterminators | 97 |
Excellent | 113 |
Afterword | 220 |
Notes | 228 |
Acknowledgments | 251 |
Other editions - View all
Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted ... Robert Sullivan No preview available - 2005 |
Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted ... Robert Sullivan No preview available - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
American animal Anne asked bait stations Barry Barry Beck began Bergh Black Death black rats Bobby Corrigan British Brooklyn brown rat building cage called City Hall city's colony crowd Dave Davis Derrick described disease downtown eating Edens Alley exterminator fleas Golden Hill habitat Harlem health department Henry Bergh hole human Jesse Gray John DeLury killed Kinyoun Larry Liberty Boys Liberty Pole live looked Manhattan mayor neighborhood nest night Norway rats Park pest control plague police rat alley rat control rat fight rat infestation Rat King rat poison rat population rat story rat trapping rat's Rattus norvegicus rent strike reported restaurant Rikers Island rodent control Ryders Alley San Francisco Sears seemed sewer soldiers sometimes Street subway talked Theatre Alley things trap rats trash walked watching woman World Trade Center wrote York City