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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. It's certainly not "dry" like other science books, and it's not too long.Īnyway, I hope you check this book out.-A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age - A New York Public Library Book to Remember from 2004 - A PSLA Young Adult Top 40 (or so) non-fiction title 2004

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes non-fiction books with a large scope and an easy style of writing. I thought to myself, "if this guy can be so serious about watching rats in an alley, I should be even more serious about my career." His determination in his own biological field study in that alley was in a weird way inspirational. He talks a lot about how he was able to meet with all these experts - he basically became a "yes man" and went on all these adventures around NYC. In all, the best takeaway I got from this book was the author's method of immersing himself in a subject. I had no idea that rat fighting was so popular, and would read a whole book on the subject. My favorite person he profiled was Kit Burns, who ran the most popular "rat fight bar" in NYC.

The book goes into many fascinating tangents, including: a history of New York and its problems with trash, background on NYC's most succesful rat exterminator, the history of rat fights and the man that set out to stop them, and an "exterminator guru" whose calendar is set in stone for years in advance for consulting work with big extermination companies.Īll of these tangents are well researched, and the people this guy talks to have colorful personalities. The book is really two books interspersed with each other - one book following his nights in that alley, and another book following his path of research into rat history. This included sitting in one alley almost every night during that year, keeping a journal and performing harmless experiments on a large group of inner-city rats. It was not written by a scientist, just a guy who took on a major fascination with rats and wanted to research them for a year.

Rats is a book about rats, in a broad sense. I just finished a book that I really liked, and here's my attempt to get you to read it. "Science books that aren't boring" is how I describe it to my friends.