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Letter to the editor

Revolting and riveting: all about rats

You want sex, violence, death, destruction? It's all here.

By Jen A. Miller, Special to the Times
Published July 15, 2007

Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed its Way to the Top
By Jerry Langton
St. Martin's Press, 207 pages, $21.95

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Don't let Ratatouille fool you. Rats are not cute or witty, nor do they have aspirations of becoming gourmet chefs. They are disease-ridden evolutionary marvels who want nothing more than to mate and eat your food. In the process, they force plant and animal species into extinction, kill people and cause $19-billion in damage per year - just in the United States.

Jerry Langton delves into the rat world in Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top, a fascinating look at how it has adapted to the world of humans.

Its biggest advantage is its outrageous sex drive. Rats mate all the time, and males have even been recorded doing so with females who are dead in traps. A female rat carries her young for such a short period of time that, by the time one litter is weaned, she's already delivering another. So rats can adapt to the environment relatively quickly, to the point that they develop immunity to rat poisons almost as fast as humans can get them on the market.

Rat is rich in history, specifically how rats' lives have dovetailed with ours. Langton shows how rats tailored their lives to those of Europeans on quests to discover the Earth, thus inhabiting and dominating new continents.

The passages about people who live with rats, like pet owners and exterminators, are the most interesting, and you wish he had focused more on them than on history.

Still, he creates such a vivid picture of how invasive rats are in our lives that you can't help looking over your shoulder as you read. "I found myself constantly thinking about rats, seeing them in the shadows and around every corner and having rat-themed dreams," he writes. I even had a rat nightmare while reading the book, and it was not about a cartoon gourmet chef.

Jen A. Miller writes for Poets & Writers, Psychology Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pages and Paste.

[Last modified July 13, 2007, 12:01:41]