Rat City
Rat City by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden is one of 2026's most credible books, appearing on 1 of the year's most respected lists, including The Guardian, for a Consensus Score of 13 out of 100.
Appears on these lists
Our take
AI-draftedAdams and Ramsden reconstruct the strange career of John B. Calhoun, the ethologist whose overcrowded rat-population experiments became a mid-century shorthand for urban decay and helped justify real housing and crime policy despite the science being far shakier than the metaphor. The book's value is in that gap, showing how a lab result about rodents got translated, with real political consequences, into panic about "rat cities" of human overcrowding.
How the Consensus Score is calculated
Our Consensus Score is our own transparent editorial metric — not a user rating. It weighs each list by the credibility of its source, how recent the listing is, and any award status. Here is the full breakdown.
| Source | Authority | Recency | Award | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Guardian | 0.85 | 0.70 | 1.00× | 0.59 |
| Weighted sum → Score | 0.59 → 13 | |||
Similar consensus books
Because they appear on some of the same lists.
Frequently asked
What lists is Rat City on?
Rat City appears on 1 list in our 2026 corpus, including The Guardian.
What is its Consensus Score?
Rat City has a Consensus Score of 13 out of 100, our transparent editorial measure of how many credible lists agree on it.