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."

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