Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
by Robert Sullivan
I picked this book out a couple of weeks ago and used a Borders gift card I received for Christmas from one of my staff to pay for it. (thank you Robin). I have no real affinity or hatred for rats. I know they gross most people out, but I'm pretty ambivalent about them. While I've seen a few of them over my lifetime either from moving grain out of elevators, taking grain to elevators, or moving grain via barge, the rat story that springs to mind most involves Nancy. One afternoon Nancy and I were walking along Delmar in front of the old Amoco station on the corner of North and South. All in a sudden from out of the alley, this good sized rat comes scurrying along. He sort of stopped, looked at us, then ran down the storm sewer. Nancy was mortified. I was, once again, ambivalent.
But now that I've read this book, I know that seeing a rat in the daytime means the rat population in the area was very large. So large that the area could not provide enough food to feed them at night and the weaker rats had to forage for food during the day. That's an interesting fact to know if you have a severed cortex like I do. There are also a lot of other interesting facts about rats in this book such as: rats are everywhere (seriously everywhere), a male rat may have sex as much as twenty times a day, and if there are nothing but male rats around, they will hump each other. But that isn't the best part of this book. Each chapter Sullivan tells a little story about rats. It might be about the history of rats, the extermination of rats, or Sullivan's own rat observations in an alley in lower Manhattan. Weaved into the chapters are tales of men and their interactions with rats. It doesn't take one very long to see the parallels between men and that most despised of rodents, the rat. Sometimes it's a bit of reach and sometimes it's eerily similar to man.
While this book isn't for the faint of heart, I really enjoyed it. If you can get past the creepy factor I think you'll enjoy it too.
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