With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits nightly 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-storieseveryone has one, it turns outSullivan 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 little alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitantsby observing the rat. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of the most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant book of the season.
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