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gayatriii's review
1.0
Nothing in my life has been such a colossal waste of time. Everything I learnt about rats from this book I could have probably learnt in fifteen mins on the internet. The only interesting section was the twenty or so pages on the Black Death, everything else is an endless drone on the writer just walking around town. Literally. Not even going to bother with remembering the "writer's" name.
While the entirety of this book was a snooze fest, the last 50 pages are just RIDIC!!
Note to self - Listen to that inner voice and abandon a book when it tells you to. Can't believe I started my year with this nonsense.
While the entirety of this book was a snooze fest, the last 50 pages are just RIDIC!!
Note to self - Listen to that inner voice and abandon a book when it tells you to. Can't believe I started my year with this nonsense.
angela_juniper's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.25
I love history, but this book was a bit dated and just kind of a slog to get through. I felt it could have done with a more linear timeline as it returned to certain concepts in and out of order. Maybe I would’ve appreciated this book more had I lived in New York City, but I really had a hard time staying interested.
pattricejones's review
I have to agree with other reviewers: This is not a book about rats, a group of whom the author cursorily observed for a few months but made no real effort to understand. His interest is in human-rat relations within cities. His treatment of that topic, while studded with fun facts, also is superficial.
loujoseph's review
3.0
The parts more about the history of rats in cities, the plague, etc were good, the parts where the author tried to use rats as metaphors for, well, whatever, wasn't as successful, they read as bad attempts at This American Life style "deepness." The parts where he was relating his experiences following rats in alleys was a more successful version of that.
aquint's review
3.0
Really interesting but got a bit corny at times. He was trying to be a little too poetic about rats for my taste plus there were some editing issues. Loved the history though.
brogan7's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
medium-paced
4.5
Full of interesting information and written in an accessible style.
I particularly enjoyed the history of rat migration and displacement of Rattus rattus by Rattus norvegicus, the chapter on the plague and on the plague in the US, and the natural history observations he made of the rats in "his" alley, with an attitude somewhere between attraction and revulsion, and sometimes quite comical.
In the chapter on the plague, Sullivan talks about a friar who made pertinent observations about the robe he was wearing while working at a pesthouse in Genoa: a robe which kept fleas at bay (but he didn't know that that also kept plague at bay, at the time), therefore he noted the absence of fleas due to the robe but thought it was useless. Sullivan then goes on to quote an Italian historian, Carlo Cipolla's commentary on the friar's observation, which hit the nail on the head but didn't know it: "[T]hus the system prevailed and the observation was lost. In the course of human experience thousands of brilliant and accurate observations must have gone astray simply because the related pieces of the mosaic weren't there. Thousands of other observations suffered no less sad a destiny. Accurate observations may be manipulated to fit into a faulty conceptual system with the perverse result of lending support to it." (p.140)
I just love the tragedy of Friar Antero Maria da San Bonaventura having all the pieces in 1657, but not the means to connect them...of him having clear insight into what the robe did...and not recognizing his own survival depended on it.
And how so often, indeed, our daily, ordinary observations are accurate and true, but we can't see the truth of them for the systems we are locked into, and the lack of imagination of how things might be assembled, to set us free from legion of suffering.
I particularly enjoyed the history of rat migration and displacement of Rattus rattus by Rattus norvegicus, the chapter on the plague and on the plague in the US, and the natural history observations he made of the rats in "his" alley, with an attitude somewhere between attraction and revulsion, and sometimes quite comical.
In the chapter on the plague, Sullivan talks about a friar who made pertinent observations about the robe he was wearing while working at a pesthouse in Genoa: a robe which kept fleas at bay (but he didn't know that that also kept plague at bay, at the time), therefore he noted the absence of fleas due to the robe but thought it was useless. Sullivan then goes on to quote an Italian historian, Carlo Cipolla's commentary on the friar's observation, which hit the nail on the head but didn't know it: "[T]hus the system prevailed and the observation was lost. In the course of human experience thousands of brilliant and accurate observations must have gone astray simply because the related pieces of the mosaic weren't there. Thousands of other observations suffered no less sad a destiny. Accurate observations may be manipulated to fit into a faulty conceptual system with the perverse result of lending support to it." (p.140)
I just love the tragedy of Friar Antero Maria da San Bonaventura having all the pieces in 1657, but not the means to connect them...of him having clear insight into what the robe did...and not recognizing his own survival depended on it.
And how so often, indeed, our daily, ordinary observations are accurate and true, but we can't see the truth of them for the systems we are locked into, and the lack of imagination of how things might be assembled, to set us free from legion of suffering.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal cruelty
TW: rat fights