A staff member of the store approached me and said, 'I know this sounds strange, but the staff recommends this book very highly.' One of his colleagues joined us and said 'I loved that book.'In the hotel that night I began to read the book and I was immediately engrossed. I immediately picked it up and started to read the cover. I looked for a book about the Triangle Shirt Factory fire and couldn't find one I hadn't already read (that's often the fate of someone who is interested in labour history/ethics) but there was this book entitled 'Rats' by Robert Sullivan.

When we went to the museum we needed to use a couple of their lockers for our backpacks, and of course being who I am, we were early so we looked around the Tenament Museum shop. (At least one rat makes an appearance in almsot every book I've read about New York City.) We were only in the city for two days before going to Croton on Hudson, but we knew we'd hit the museum and we kept looking for rats. Two of the things I wished to see were the Tenament Museum and a New York City Rat. It was the first time I had ever been to New York City, although I had been all around it several times. Recently, I went to New York City with my son.

With an all-new Afterword by the author Read more 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

Rats by robert sullivan summary