He still gets a little freaked-out working around and in proximity to rats, even after a year of “observing.” I am happy to say, after reading Rats, author Sullivan is like most Americans. No one, in his right mind, willingly gives up a year of their life to observe rats in their natural habitat. I remember thinking he sounds sane and looks normal, but what is wrong with this man. In 2004, the year Rats was published, I heard Sullivan on NPR and as a guest of David Letterman. Robert Sullivan, author of The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt, is currently a contributing editor to Vogue and constant contributor to the New Yorker. Show More Robert Sullivan, as our 2007 guidebook.
Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting yet always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing. 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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