خورشید و ماه: داستان واقعی شگفت‌انگیز از فریبکاران، نمایشگران، خبرنگاران دوئل‌کننده و خفاش‌های انسانی در نیویورک قرن نوزدهم

On August 26, 1835, a fledgling newspaper called the Sun brought to New York the first accounts of remarkable lunar discoveries. A series of six articles reported the existence of life on the moonincluding unicorns, beavers that walked on their hind legs, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. In a matter of weeks it was the most broadly circulated newspaper story of the era, and the Sun , a working-class upstart, became the most widely read paper in the world. An exhilarating narrative history of a divided city on the cusp of greatness, and tale of a crew of writers, editors, and charlatans who stumbled on a new kind of journalism, The Sun and the Moon tells the surprisingly true story of the penny papers that made America a nation of newspaper readers. From Publishers Weekly 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.) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library Journal 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, 17881850 ). 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 Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.