Just Read: Rats by Robert Sullivan

What can you say about a book on rats? I picked it up in the store because of the great Peter Sis cover, and bought it because I'm on a non-fiction kick lately (especially New Yorker-y non-fiction reportage).

And this one was definitely worth the time. Sullivan crouched in an alley near Wall Street off and on, over the course of about a year. Along the way, he read a lot of books about rats, and talked to a lot of rat experts (mostly exterminators, who come across as a lively, interesting bunch). It's not a long book, but it's just the right length for a book for general readers about rats.

Sullivan has a new afterword for the paperback edition (which is the way I read this book), in which he seems to be surprised at the audience this book got. (He seems a bit stunned that so many people are as interested in rats as he was.) Well, Sullivan kept me interested, which is what a good writer is supposed to do, so he shouldn't be surprised. To be blunter, now I think I'm going to look for Sullivan's previous book, called The Meadowlands and presumably about the swamp in my home state of Jersey. I may just be a sucker for parochial matters, but I know what I like. (And I like reading about odd bits of fact concerning things I think I already know about.)