A Phenomenally Weird Tale of a Man and His Rodent Metropolis

RAT CITY: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun, by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden

There used to be a guy who’d turn up around New York wearing a two-tone Day-Glo mohawk, a pair of coordinating rats perched atop his shoulders. Tourists gawked; locals mostly hurried their steps. Notwithstanding the ever-smaller dogs favored by many of Manhattan’s elite, genus Rattus has never quite caught on with polite society.

Perhaps society should reconsider. As Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden make plain in their entertaining, phenomenally weird “Rat City,” there is a great deal more connecting us with our ubiquitous furry neighbors than we might imagine.

The authors’ unorthodox thesis pairs well with their unusual methodology, signaled by the book’s wordy subtitle: “Rat City” may well be the world’s first-ever work of socio-biographical-scientific pop history.

The biography at the heart of this improbable mishmash focuses on a person who, himself, combined some rather disparate qualities. Born in rural Tennessee in 1917, John Bumpass Calhoun — known as Jack to friends and family — was a devotee of nature from early childhood, a “country boy with his own small-bore shotgun,” ever curious about the inner workings of the animal world.

His curiosity would lead him to an ecology Ph.D. at Northwestern, then a post at Johns Hopkins, where his tale first collides with the bigger, furrier themes of the book. Beset, in the 1940s, by a near-Hamelin-level rat infestation, Baltimore turned to Calhoun and a group of his colleagues for solutions.