As other reviewers have noted, this book is compromised by two serious flaws. One, rats turn out to be an insuffiently engaging subject for a micro-history of this sort. I don't feel like I learned much about them that was particularly interesting or unexpected, and the book feels padded. Two, Sullivan is a lousy writer. His prose is rambling and disorganized. He makes spelling errors, misuses words, uses tenses in disagreement, and more. Was this book even edited, I wondered? I doesn't seem like it. The yarns he spins to pad the book are not very interesting and tend to petter out without going anywhere. He wrote a book about himself writing a book about rats, and it's not a good one.