Conversations and field studies with "pest control technicians" spirit him back to 1960s Harlem, when rat infestations played a part in the Civil Rights movement and the creation of tenants' organizations. Observing a group of rats in a New York City alley, just blocks from a pre–September 11 World Trade Center, leads Sullivan into a timeless world that has more twists than Manhattan's rat-friendly underbelly. you are within close proximity to one or more rats having sex"), Sullivan quickly focuses in on the rat's seemingly inexhaustible number of connections to mankind. After pointing out a host of facts about rats that are sure to make you start itching ("if you are in New York. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting yet always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.In this excellent narrative, Sullivan uses the brown rat as the vehicle for a labyrinthine history of the Big Apple. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win basic rights for tenants, Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses - its herd-of-rats-like mob. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits 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. 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.
Rats live in the world precisely where humans do they survive on the effluvia of human society they eat our garbage. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants - by observing the rat. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature.
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