Okay, so when I was in the first grade, my across-the-street frenemy Lindsay Kagawa had a pet rat named Twinkie.
Since I'm currently on the bus to Philadelphia (INTERNET! On the BUS! I'm like a RAT in a FILTHY REEKING GARBAGE BAG!!!), there's no time like the present. I've sat on my stoop on a fine spring day, watching the big rats romp in the yard, climbing into bags of trash and writhing joyously around inside, like the cartoon rat Templeton in that memorable fair scene in the Charlotte's Web movie.Īnyway, this rat yesterday clearly wanted something, and I took its keenly intimidating, beady-eyed stare to mean that it was telling me that I'd better review this book. The hole's recently been plugged up, but the rats don't seem to care as this book reminds us, they're adaptable animals. They live in a hole in the dirt and frolic in the garbage. It was still light out, and the thing just stood there stolidly gazing up, unafraid, just, yeah, looking at me! See, my front yard is infested with large, fearless rats. Yesterday when I came out of my building, I was confronted by a giant rat standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up at me. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing. Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herds-of-rats-like mob.
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. In Rats, the critically acclaimed bestseller, Robert Sullivan spends a year investigating a rat-infested alley just a few blocks away from Wall Street. 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. "Engaging.a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Timesīehold 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. PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year New York Public Library Book for the Teenager
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