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I hate rats.
Let's get that out of the way early on. I cannot stand them. They fill me with visceral, screaming revulsion. It's not their fault. They've never done anything to me, and it's a prejudice I should try and get over, which is one of my reasons for reading this book. I was, therefore, honestly pretty delighted to find that Sullivan can't really stand them either. Oh, he's fascinated by them... but only to a point. He'll watch them squirm about in a garbage bag, but to go over and open the bag to see them foraging inside it? Hell no, there are rats in there! There's a colony of them living in some pit in the alley he's stalking - he watches brown rats in an alley for a year - and does he go and take a closer look? He does not - the pit is deep and dark and there are rats in there. He experiences a sudden swarm and there are at least a hundred rats, a number which he admits is not at all inflated by a sudden hysterical over-reaction on his part. I laughed. I'd be the same. It's very entertaining, and book is certainly compulsive reading.
Lately I've been reading a lot of animal books, and the ones focused on a certain species tend to be strongly scientific. This isn't, and while I love science, it's a nice change. Sullivan's more concerned with the history of rats in New York. His experiences watching rats in this particular alley - from a safe distance, of course - are frequently interrupted by chapters on this history. There's the introduction of Norway rats to New York in the eighteenth century, the rat fighting pits of the nineteenth century, the rent and sanitation strikes of the twentieth century, and the extermination efforts around the ruins of the World Trade Centre after planes were flown into them in 2001. So, a wide range of histories, and they are all interesting... though it must be said, the final chapter veers off into lengthy irrelevance, shoe-horned in by a very thin metaphor, and this is clearly a darling that should have been killed, in my opinion, but other than that one digression, the book was focused and chatty and interesting.
I still hate rats though. Sorry.
Let's get that out of the way early on. I cannot stand them. They fill me with visceral, screaming revulsion. It's not their fault. They've never done anything to me, and it's a prejudice I should try and get over, which is one of my reasons for reading this book. I was, therefore, honestly pretty delighted to find that Sullivan can't really stand them either. Oh, he's fascinated by them... but only to a point. He'll watch them squirm about in a garbage bag, but to go over and open the bag to see them foraging inside it? Hell no, there are rats in there! There's a colony of them living in some pit in the alley he's stalking - he watches brown rats in an alley for a year - and does he go and take a closer look? He does not - the pit is deep and dark and there are rats in there. He experiences a sudden swarm and there are at least a hundred rats, a number which he admits is not at all inflated by a sudden hysterical over-reaction on his part. I laughed. I'd be the same. It's very entertaining, and book is certainly compulsive reading.
Lately I've been reading a lot of animal books, and the ones focused on a certain species tend to be strongly scientific. This isn't, and while I love science, it's a nice change. Sullivan's more concerned with the history of rats in New York. His experiences watching rats in this particular alley - from a safe distance, of course - are frequently interrupted by chapters on this history. There's the introduction of Norway rats to New York in the eighteenth century, the rat fighting pits of the nineteenth century, the rent and sanitation strikes of the twentieth century, and the extermination efforts around the ruins of the World Trade Centre after planes were flown into them in 2001. So, a wide range of histories, and they are all interesting... though it must be said, the final chapter veers off into lengthy irrelevance, shoe-horned in by a very thin metaphor, and this is clearly a darling that should have been killed, in my opinion, but other than that one digression, the book was focused and chatty and interesting.
I still hate rats though. Sorry.