Rats

It seems like a bit of a long title for a New York Times Bestseller but I promise this book is educational, entertaining, and worth every second. Sullivan spent a year observing a rat-infested alley, and came away with a better understanding of our least-favorite rodents, as well as the many people who spend their lives trying to keep rats and humans apart. At first it might seem weird to sit outside and watch the rats every night, but by the end, you can’t imagine doing anything else.

Robert Sullivan sits squarely in the engagé mode of urban chronicles. Excitable and often wildly entertaining, he taught me how unpromising facets of city life could be mined as revelatory pieces of the larger urban mosaic. Whether examining the ever-confounding urban malaise of rats, or scavenging the landfills of New Jersey for the ruins of New York’s old Pennsylvania Station—as in his book The Meadowlands, which I particularly recommend—Sullivan artfully extrapolates meaning from the mundane. To get there, he puts himself and his sometimes delirious obsessions at the heart of the story, his journey of discovery one with our… show more.

Sullivan’s narrative nonfiction illuminates the New York that the city’s rats have conquered, and it’s a humbling, fascinating place. One of the epicenters, for Sullivan, is Wall Street, where he began doing research a few months before 9/11, blocks from the Twin Towers. The book isn’t about the aftermath of 9/11, its sticks to rats, but at moments it does become a chronicle of the city during this shocking and disturbing time, when going underground with the rats seems like a reasonable idea.