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A review by millennial_dandy
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman
5.0
This was one of those books I picked up on a lark while waiting in line at my library. Something about the color pallet and Mr. Baker's gorgeous, strange lithograph illustrations on the cover drew me in. Then, upon reading the subheading of the title my eyebrows contracted and I may even have uttered a 'huh'. I was hooked, and The Sun and the Moon made its way home with me.
I'm not typically a reader of non-fiction, but who could resist 'the remarkable true account of hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats?'
The best part is that Matthew Goodman delivers every single one of those things in such a way that the kid in me who grew up reading 'Ripley's Believe it or Not' jumped for absolute joy while the adult academic in me relished the dirty details and delighted in the cameos from familiar faces such Walt Whitman and the full-blown side characters of P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe.
This is a book about the titular hoax, but it's equally an exploration of the evolution of newspaper readership in the United States, of the role of journalism among abolitionists, of the interplay between astronomy and religion. And it's all fabulously interesting. As each chapter ended I found myself mourning its completion only to find the next chapter equally as absorbing, each section building upon the last until the epilogue when the fates of those men in the center of it all are revealed.
And on top of the subject matter being inherently interesting, and the book lovingly crafted, it's well-written, each tactile detail vividly described and yet so unobstructive as to make one think one had simply been there, reflecting on a memory rather than being fed facts about a scandal over two centuries old.
I would highly, highly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in know what the hell lunar man-bats are to someone who, like me, enjoys anything that could be prefaced by that old adage: 'the truth is stranger than fiction.'
I come away from The Sun and the Moon a little wiser and, in agreement with Philip Hone, I say that this account is: 'most enormously wonderful.'
I'm not typically a reader of non-fiction, but who could resist 'the remarkable true account of hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats?'
The best part is that Matthew Goodman delivers every single one of those things in such a way that the kid in me who grew up reading 'Ripley's Believe it or Not' jumped for absolute joy while the adult academic in me relished the dirty details and delighted in the cameos from familiar faces such Walt Whitman and the full-blown side characters of P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe.
This is a book about the titular hoax, but it's equally an exploration of the evolution of newspaper readership in the United States, of the role of journalism among abolitionists, of the interplay between astronomy and religion. And it's all fabulously interesting. As each chapter ended I found myself mourning its completion only to find the next chapter equally as absorbing, each section building upon the last until the epilogue when the fates of those men in the center of it all are revealed.
And on top of the subject matter being inherently interesting, and the book lovingly crafted, it's well-written, each tactile detail vividly described and yet so unobstructive as to make one think one had simply been there, reflecting on a memory rather than being fed facts about a scandal over two centuries old.
I would highly, highly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in know what the hell lunar man-bats are to someone who, like me, enjoys anything that could be prefaced by that old adage: 'the truth is stranger than fiction.'
I come away from The Sun and the Moon a little wiser and, in agreement with Philip Hone, I say that this account is: 'most enormously wonderful.'