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Displaced Persons
'Recommended for a wide range of readers, and a perfect book club choice.' - Library Journal, starred review
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Interviews |
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Carol Lynch Williams
Carol Lynch Williams discussed The Chosen One, and what inspired her to write a book about polygamy.
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C. W. Gortner
A video interview with C.W. Gortner in which he talks about his 2010 historical novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici.
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Vanessa Woods
Vanessa Woods discusses her first book, Bonobo Handshake, and her experiences with the extrarodinary Bonobos.
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Kwei Quartey
Kwei Quartey talks about his childhood in Ghana and his first novel, Wife of the Gods, set in a small Ghanaian community where long-buried secrets are about to rise to the surface.
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Summary and Book Reviews |
Rats: Summary and book reviews of Rats by Robert Sullivan, plus links to an excerpt from Rats and a biography of Robert Sullivan. |
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Book Summary
A BookBrowse Favorite Book |
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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.
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled little alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants—by observing the rat.
Rats live in the world precisely where humans do; they survive on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. 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. 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. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win tenants basic rights, Sullivan looks deeper and deeper into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses—its herd-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.
Did you know?
- 26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats, 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused, and rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world’s food supply each year. The rat has been called the world’s most destructive mammal—other than man.
- Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats a year: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.
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| BOOK REVIEWS |
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Media Reviews
Library Journal - Michael D Cramer
Well written and fun to read, this book has only one drawback - a lack of more detailed information on rat biology. Recommended for all natural history and large urban collections.
Booklist - Ray Olson
Like a typical bit of Talk, the book never lets its ostensible subject divert too much attention from its author.....So it just seems like it's always about Sullivan. At least it's also always enlighteningly entertaining, like Talk of the Town.
Publishers Weekly
In this excellent narrative, Sullivan uses the brown rat as the vehicle for a labyrinthine history of the Big Apple....This book is a must pickup for every city dweller, even if you'll feel like you need to wash your hands when you put it down. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
The New Yorker
For a year, Sullivan made pilgrimages to a 'filth-slicked little alley' near City Hall to observe rats in their natural habitat. He also trolled libraries for rat lore and interviewed exterminators, biologists, politicians, and ordinary citizens about the timeless struggle against New York’s 'most unwanted inhabitants.' The logic behind his peregrinations is often elusive, but the result is a wealth of satisfying information.
The New York Times - William Grimes
Robert Sullivan sees the rat as much more than a pest. For him, the rat is the New Yorker par excellence, the plucky immigrant who set foot in Manhattan just about the time of the American Revolution and, by guile and persistence, put down roots and prospered. The rat is also, for those who care to look closely enough, a living map of the city, so tightly integrated into the local environment that to know one is to know the other. Early on, Sullivan goes so far as to call the rat ''our mirror species,'' a faithful follower that turns up wherever humans pitch their tents and toss out their garbage.
The Washington Post - Phillip Lopate
Few subjects would seem less immediately appealing to the general reader than rats. So all the more credit must go to Robert Sullivan, who has written an immensely lively, enjoyable, learned, witty and, yes, appealing book on these damnable creatures.
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| Editor's Choice |
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Brodeck
Phillipe Claudel |
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Set in an unnamed time and place, Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar, myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck. |
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
C. W. Gortner |
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From the fairy-tale châteaux of the Loire Valley to the battlefields of the wars of religion to the mob-filled streets of Paris, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is the extraordinary untold journey of one of the most maligned and misunderstood women ever to be queen. |
Bonobo Handshake
Vanessa Woods |
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A young woman follows her fiancé to war-torn Congo to study extremely endangered bonobo apes - who teach her a new truth about love and belonging. |
Rock Paper Tiger
Lisa Brackmann |
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American Ellie Cooper, deserted by her husband, has made a number of friends in China. But suddenly one of them disappears, and security organizations are hounding her for information. Contacted through an online role-playing game by a group claiming to be friends of Lao Zhang asking her for... |
Beirut 39
Samuel Shimon |
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An exciting collection of the best new writing from the Arab world, by thirty-nine writers under thirty-nine. |
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