Book Review: The Sun and the Moon

We all every so often find a book we either love or hate. It might be nice to let each other know about them. For example, I was recently loaned a book by my friend John, from the Providence Athenaeum, who assured me that I’d love it, because it included, among others, man-bats. OK. It also has a very, almost nothing title, The Sun and the Moon. Now, what John didn’t let on was the following: The Sun in the title isn’t our nice warm neighbor, but one of a number of penny newspapers put out in the early 1800s in New York City. The Moon, although this is obvious, refers to the alleged observations of it by one of the premier astronomers of that century, Sir John Herschel.

In the 1830s New York was overrun by newspapers, all doing their best to be the best, and to topple as many of their rivals as they possibly could. Enter Richard Adams Locke, hired by Sun editor Benjamin Day to report on the daily court news. However, Locke had dreams of something better. Learning of Herschel’s work in South Africa, Locke proceeded to create a scientific journal from which he had learned, from a “Dr. Andrew Grant,” that Herschel had built a telescope of such marvelous proportions and abilities that it was able to view the surface with such detail that Herschel observed wooded areas, with trees of every detail, riverbanks, and centered around them, life of all kinds, resembling bisons, unicorns, biped beavers, and, most shocking of all, menlike creatures with batlike wings – man-bats. Needless to say, the Sun’s circulation increased exponentially.

And John Herschel? He only learned about his “great moment in astronomical observation” months later, when an acquaintance looked him up in the Cape Town area and congratulated him on his wondrous works. The Sun and the Moon is a great journey not only into one of the biggest hoaxes in astronomical history, but in the workings of 19th century newspapers. We also are introduced to some of the great players of that time, historic names such as Edgar Allen Poe – who was originally believed to have been the author of the hoax – and P. T. Barnum, whose life as a trickster was begun by his dad.

Matthew Goodman, the author, has written one of the most researched books of all time. Everything in this has been meticulously checked for accuracy. This book was one of the most fascinating, most detailed that I’ve ever read, one that brings to life a time in history that isn’t normally thought about, a time, as the subtitle states, of “hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats.” Enjoy.