December 20th, 2006
Review – Rats
Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants
by Robert Sullivan
This is a curious book. To start with, it is short. Without the Notes section, it is about 220 pages. There is no index or photographs or illustrations. The text has the feel of a random selection of magazine articles thrown together. There is an attempt to hold the whole thing together with the author’s own personal observations of rats in an alley in lower Manhattan, but the author tends to spend more time discussing what he was wearing or drinking than about the actual rats in the alley. I am fairly certain that you could rearrange many of the chapters in virtually any order and the book would not significantly change. The writing style is occasionally humorous but for the most part seems like an attempt to be erudite rather than an actual success.
As to what you will actually learn about rats, there is very little here. You will learn more by going to Wikipedia, and the writing there is no worse. Many of his “facts” are prefaced by, “According to one study…”, “By one estimate…”, “One rat expert theorizes…”. This might not be too bad if the source of these “facts” were cited but they aren’t so there is no way to verify any of the information provided. And when an author is making fairly outrageous claims such as that one-third of the world’s food supply is eaten by rats, the reader would like some support other than just the author’s word. Also, the author tells us early on that there are only about 400,000 rats in New York but then he interviews an “expert” that he admires who tells us that there are millions of rats living deep under the city who never come to the surface. Is there any support for this? Is it 400,000 or millions? And even when he gets his facts right he gets them wrong. For example, the author writes about the rats link to the Black Death but fails to note that the Brown rat that is in the city is not the rat that carries plague and in fact, probably can’t carry plague. The rat of the Black Death was the Black Rat which is not the rat the author is writing about.
Which brings up the side trips on the journey. Almost anyone in New York who has something to do with rats is a potential target for a chapter. Many of these people are not the least bit interesting and the claims they make are unsupported by any evidence but the author simply reports them as fact. His writing fails to cover any subject in any depth. He writes a chapter about John DeLury, for example, who was the head of the sanitation worker’s union in the 1970′s with very little detail beyond what you would expect in a typical obituary. And then he ends the short chapter with excitement that a friend of a friend is a grandson of DeLury. Ho-hum. He tries to interview people who might remember so-and-so who had some remote link to rats years ago but the interviews go nowhere. A typical response he gets is, “I didn’t know him personally but I understand that people spoke highly of him.” Excuse me? Why is this even worth writing down? Is the author that desperate to pad his book?
Overall the book does not educate the reader about rats, does not provide much in the way of historical detail, and barely entertains. I would not recommend that anyone waste their time on it.
