rats observations on the history and habitat

|a Rats : |b observations on the history and habitat of the city's most unwanted inhabitants / |c Robert Sullivan. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting yet always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.

With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win basic rights for tenants, Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses - its herd-of-rats-like mob. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits in the streamlike flow of garbage and searches for fabled rat kings, sets out to trap a rat, and eventually travels to the Midwest to learn about rats in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities of America. While dispensing gruesomely fascinating rat facts and strangely entertaining rat stories - everyone has one, it turns out - 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. Rats live in the world precisely where humans do they survive on the effluvia of human society they eat our garbage. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants - by observing the rat.

Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. 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. Annotation: The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback with an all-new afterword by the author.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.Subtitle: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.

Rats observations on the history and habitat