Rats Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

by Sullivan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9781582344775
• ISBN10: 1582344779
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-04-11
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback with an all-new afterword by the author. 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.

Author Biography

Robert Sullivan is the author of The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He is a contributing editor to Vogue and a longtime contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Table of Contents

1 Nature	1	(4)
2 The City Rat	5	(10)
3 Where I Went to See Rats and Who Sent Me There	15	(12)
4 Edens Alley	27	(7)
5 Brute Neighbors	34	(15)
6 Summer	49	(10)
7 Unrepresented Man	59	(10)
8 Food	69	(7)
9 Fights	76	(10)
10 Garbage	86	(11)
11 Exterminators	97	(16)
12 Excellent	113	(17)
13 Trapping	130	(6)
14 Plague	136	(9)
15 Winter	145	(8)
16 Plague in America	153	(11)
17 Catching	164	(20)
18 Rat King	184	(10)
19 A Golden Hill	194	(19)
20 Spring	213	(7)
Afterword	220	(8)
Notes	228	(23)
Acknowledgments	251