The Sun and the moon [the remarkable true account of hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats in nineteenth-century New York]

Benjamin Day was the publisher of the New York Sun in the early 1800s who famously quipped, If a dog bites a man, that's not news. But if a man bites a dog, that's news. Day and his paper provide journalist Goodman with an entry point into the New York City of 1835 crowded, filthy, filled with cholera and crime, and alive with possibility for hucksters of all sorts. Goodman showcases a series of articles published by the Sun in the summer of 1835 that purported to describe life on the moon, filled with flying man-bats. He takes off from these articles and their success (papers sold out so fast that starving newsboys were kept in oysters and good lodgings for weeks) to a description of 1835 New York. Connections are fairly flimsy, and this lacks the narrative drive of The Devil in the White City or Seabiscuit. Still, if the book fails as creative nonfiction, it still tells an intriguing story and reveals some fascinating facts about nineteenth-century New York.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2008 Booklist

Goodman offers a highly atmospheric account of a hoax that he says reflects the birth of tabloid journalism and New York City's emergence as a city with worldwide influence. In August 1835, New York Sun editor Richard Adams Locke wrote and published a hoax about a newfangled telescope that revealed fantastic images of the moon, including poppy fields, waterfalls and blue skies. Animals from unicorns to horned bears inhabited the moon, but most astonishing were the four-foot-tall "man-bats" who talked, built temples and fornicated in public. The sensational moon hoax was reprinted across America and Europe. Edgar Allan Poe grumbled that the tale had been cribbed from one of his short stories; Sun owner Benjamin Day saw his paper become the most widely read in the world; and a pre-eminent British astronomer complained that his good name had been linked to those "incoherent ravings." Goodman (Jewish Food) offers a richly detailed and engrossing glimpse of the birth of tabloid journalism in an antebellum New York divided by class, ethnicity and such polarizing issues as slavery, religion and intellectual freedom. B&w illus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Goodman (Jewish Food), "Food Maven" columnist for the Forward, encapsulates the enterprising city of New York's schemes and social fabric in an account of the penny newspaper, The Sun's 1835 series purporting to document life on the moon. Assisted by his own talents for fiction writing, Goodman shows how this new working-class organ, by printing fabrications rather than facts (as well as by pioneering the penny per copy press), became the most widely read newspaper in the world. Using magazines, memoirs, and guidebooks of the period, Goodman maintains that the radical English expatriate editor Richard Adams Locke devised the so-called moon hoax to satirize the claims of religious astronomers who believed that God had created extraterrestrial life. This is a rollicking read, perhaps better at conveying a lyrical feel for the time and place than for its scholarly analysis (for which see Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850). Lengthy biographical accounts of P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe, introduced in part to evince how deception and plagiarism characterized the period, while interesting, are extraneous and little related to the main story. Gracefully worded, footnoted, and with a bibliography, this book's appeal nevertheless is more to the general reader than to the academic. Recommended for public libraries.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A delightful recounting of "the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism." The moon, it turns out, is covered with poppy fields, grassy plains, forests and lakes, and populated by assorted shellfish, single-horned goats, bi-ped beavers, miniature zebras and four-foot-tall, simian, winged creaturesso-called "man-bats"capable of conversation and religious worship. Or so wrote Richard Adams Locke in his sensational 1835 series for New York's Sun. Intended as a satire of those who would make science the handmaiden of religion, Locke's Great Astronomical Discoveries mixed just enough real-life names, genuine science and plausible technological advances to be believable. Reprinted and debated in competing papers, the series helped turn the Sun, the first of the penny papers, into the world's largest-selling newspaper. Although Goodman (Jewish Food, 2005, etc.) focuses on the anatomy of Locke's brilliant deception, he also surveys New York's newspaper scene at a time when the dailies were becoming something more than a compilation of commercial information, currency-conversion tables and reprints of outdated foreign news. The trend toward local, preferably sensational, news was led by the Sun's publisher Benjamin Day who, in addition to setting the penny price, practically invented the idea of newsboys to hawk his paper and lithographs to illustrate the stories. The true appeal of Goodman's story, though, lies in his skillful interweaving of "an elaborate series of deceptions and exposures" in the air near the time of Locke's creation: P.T. Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth, the 161-year-old nursemaid of George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe's faked account of Monck Mason's balloon flight across the Atlantic and the shady story of religious con man Mathias the Prophet, whose gullible disciples included Sojourner Truth. Goodman consistently entertains with his tale of press manipulation, hucksterism and the seemingly bottomless capacity for people to believe the most outrageous things. Absolutely charming. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.