![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Like the subject of this, his third book, he thrives among detritus. Sullivan, whose first book, The Meadowlands, established him as the Lewis and Clark of New Jersey’s most notorious landfill, appears to be making a career out of trash. “The rats of New York are quicker-witted than those on farms,” Joseph Mitchell claims in his classic brief on the urban rat, “Rats on the Waterfront,” first published in The New Yorker in 1944, “and they can outthink any man who has not made a study of their habits.” Such a man would not be Robert Sullivan, whose wonderfully discursive Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, takes over where Mitchell’s paean leaves off. There are rats in the country to be sure, but rats tend to prosper in more densely settled places where, among other things, they make a practice of biting infants in their cribs, probably because the babies’ faces bear traces of food rats are nothing if not opportunistic. Seeing that rat advancing on her sleeping daughter convinced her, she said, that it was time to quit the city. “But that was in New York City.” The girl’s mother confirmed the rat in the crib story. “When I was a baby, a rat came into my crib and almost bit me,” the girl reported. Walking through my daughter’s school not long ago I came upon a fourth-grader nuzzling a pet rat. ![]()
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