Which actually has the wonderful full title of "The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York"

This is the second Matthew Goodman book I've read, having read his Nellie Bly book before I could get hold of this one. And I don't know what to make of it, or even if I liked it. Actually I think I quite liked it, but it isn't exactly what it says on the jar - I was expecting something entirely focussed on the Moon Hoax as published in the Sun Newspaper (hence the title), but instead it's also a biography of the newspaper industry in 1830's New York, including several famous editors and other luminaries. Which kind of makes sense, because such a thing as a multi-day hoax as a feature in a newspaper really makes sense in the time and place given, and the reactions of the other papers are quite germane. But it's also a biography of P.T. Barnum, who wasn't actually connected other than being another inveterate huckster of the time, of Edgar Allan Poe, who also wasn't actually connected other than he was upset because he thought it plagiarised a story of his. And Joice Heth, one of Barnum's early exploits in humbuggery. And Richard Adam Locke, who actually did write the Moon story as it came to be known. And Sir John Herschel, who wasn't involved either, although the Moon story was attributed to him.

There's a LOT of competing biographies going on in here, and while they are all fascinating people, Goodman has a tendency to jump around timeline-wise, and to repeat himself a little. So we hear about Joice Heth not actually being 160 years old in the first chapter... and in the fourth, and the seventh, and the eighth, and the eleventh and you get the idea. 

There's also a ton of fascinating little side trips into utterly unrelated things going on at the same time, and some of the throwaway lines were enough to send me off into a rabbithole of further research - yay internet. 

Take this snippet for instance, regarding an earlier hard news story that Richard Adam Locke was known for:

In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives--a 'harem,' Locke called it--six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays. (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolition movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.)

 

Well isn't that fascinating. What it doesn't mention anywhere in the book is that Isabella Van Wagenen / Sojourner Truth was a co-defendant in the Matthias murder trial, which makes it even more interesting. I have so many notes now of interesting things to go find a book about, it's a little ridiculous (luckily this book has some 20% of it's pages taken up with references and citations, so with any luck I will actually be able to find many of those books - I just don't know when I'll have time to read them all.)

Another fun quote, this time quoting from the Moon story itself: 

"It did not take David Brewster long to grasp the import of the idea and when he did the effect was extraordinary: "Sir David sprung from his chair in an ecstacy of conviction," reported the Supplement, "and leaping half-way to the ceiling, exclaimed, 'Thou art the man!'"

Which made me laugh. An 1835 early example of "you the man" :)

There's a great deal of material also on Poe, and I think he's pretty much worth a good biography of his own, rather than being shoehorned into this one. Poe and Locke met only once, to anyone's knowledge, and although Poe was deeply upset over the Moon hoax, having published a version of just such a story a month or two earlier to little acclaim, he was in fact a fan of Richard Adam Locke himself. So it seems odd that he's pitched as an adversary for most of the book, only to find out at the very end that Locke said he'd never seen Poe's story, and Poe publicly stated he believed him. 

And I never quite understood why there's so much space given to Barnum, and particularly Barnum and Joice Heth (which is a tale that makes me distinctly uncomfortable). And I would have liked more quotes out of the moon story, which actually only gets a few pages dedicated to it in the middle of the book.

Still, Goodman is an engaging writer, and the characters are vivid and larger than life. But as much as I like meandering into side tracks, I kept finding myself thinking "Why is this stuff in this book". 

Recommended for: Poe fans, History and Hoaxes fans, Barnum fans

Not recommended for: anyone who likes authors, even NF ones, to get to the point and sooner rather than later

This is sort of a reblog of myself, because I have a habit of making up reading lists like this - and this one has been sitting since last September in my GR writing area.

While I like the Booklikes' list idea, what I can't figure out is whether I can add any annotations or writing on this list - I'm thinking no? Because here's the thing - a reading list doesn't make much sense with only a single title to pull it together. You need to have a little bit of context before you'll understand the purpose, if it has a specific theme that is. Or alternately you could make a really, really long title, I suppose

My "new" Reading list:

Media Hoaxes and History

Under the page break is the long list of those books that I posted in my GR writing area, explaining what some of those books are and why I started the list in the first place. Some of the specifics are important - and here's a great example of why - because some of the hoax stories are short stories found only within a collection, you'll not be able to figure out the hoax just by looking at the books.

Each "article" consists of two or more pages of comics. There are seven sections in the Bibliography at the end of the book, and multiple sources are listed under each topic section. Multiple artists create the comics, so the style of artwork changes throughout the book. (All of the above is true for all the Big Book of Comics. Or all the ones I've read, anyway.)

I'm not sure exactly how to rate this on a scale of "how everyone else rates books" - mainly because all comics/graphic novels are sort of a special category for me. It's not that I wasn't allowed to buy comics when I was little - it's just that my parents really wanted me to read "real" books instead, and never had any problem providing me with more of them. So they weren't forbidden, just rare, and I somehow didn't go to many stores that sold them. When I did and found one I wanted, it was a special sort of treat. And so now there's still a fun sort of thrill for me when I read comics of any kind.

Of course the Big Book Of series aren't children's comics - the titles alone make that fairly clear. The whole series picks up on the "strange but true" sorts of facts that have always made interesting stories. 

Like all the Big Book Of comics there's really too much content here for me to cover everything - so I'll just pass along the table of contents. For those of you who can't wait for the book to learn the hoax information (and the sections sound interesting enough so that I know I'd be in that group myself) - I've added links (most are to wikipedia, if there was an entry) so you can absorb some odd history.

Contents:

1) The Art of the Hoax
Fritz Kreisler: Manufacturing Musical Masterpieces (wiki)
Billy Tipton's Secret (wiki)
Alceo Dossena: The Man Who Made Genuine Fakes (wiki)
Elmer de Hory (wiki)
The "Autobiography" of Howard Hughes (wiki)
The Hitler Diaries (wiki)
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (wiki)

--from a "spokesman for the National Biological Foundation" from a story in the Herald-News (Roscommon, Michigan) reporting on scientists' experiment of releasing freshwater sharks into three northern Michigan lakes to see if they would breed.

The key bit of info here? The date of publication: April 1, 1981.

And yes, people did believe this story. Even though the final sentence is a huge hint: "Doherty also noted that April 1 is a foolish time to be telling fishy stories."

Quote from the book: Media Hoaxes by Fred Fedler

When I taught mass communication history I used Fedler's book for humorous examples of reporter behavior and media hoaxes. So this full read-through was the first time I let myself read the whole book for fun, without a deadline. (It's such a different experience to read a book that way, when you have time to enjoy it.)

Fedler's a bit frustrating to read at times because of the way he chooses to describe some of the hoaxes. The Poe chapter is the best example of this - Fedler retells the entire story, making you wish you could just stop, go read the actual Poe story, then read Fedler's summing up of the response to its publication. But that's really the only downside, because the other articles Fedler describes aren't ones you could easily find in a library. Many of the end notes cite newspapers and dates that would be hard to track down without a lot of time. And that the book itself is carefully footnoted is also wonderful - because it does make it a great resource for future researchers.

Another thing that's useful - it's not written in an academic style. While I wouldn't say it's excellent nonfiction writing, I would happily assign it to 5th and 6th graders. (Or younger, depending on reading ability.) And it's just the kind of book that's useful to teach at a younger age because being able to properly critique media, ponder what's true and false, and realizing what a hoax is - well, it's all vital for learning how to use and rate media.

I became so enthralled with the idea of media hoaxes and finding some of them available to read online (for free, which I always love) that I began this ridiculously long list:
Media Hoaxes and Famous Satires: Because I Do Enjoy Making Reading Lists (and Also Somehow Poe is to Blame)
Poe is to blame because I'd just finished a book of his detective stories and then was reading this and bam, long Poe chapter. Pesky author, fine - I will read your newspaper articles/stories! (Also that reading list is still a work in progress. I have many more links to add to it. Eventually I'll move it over here when finished and add it to my Booklikes sidebar.)

.....................................................

Contents:
I. America's Greatest Hoaxers: Franklin, Poe, Twain, and De Quille
1. English Traditions: Ben Franklin's Satire and Hoaxes
2. To the Moon in a Balloon" Poe's Horrifying Hoaxes
3. American Humor: Mark Twain and Dan De Quille

II. Journalism's Most Successful Hoaxes
4. Fooling the Masses: Astronomer Sees the Moon's "Bat-men"
5. Reinforcing a Stereotype: Railways and Revolvers in Georgia
6. Helping the Public? Wild Animals Escape in New York
7. Is the Press Too Powerful? Chicago's Awful Theater Fire
8. Improved and Updated: The Hoax That Caused a War
9. An Enduring Hoax: H. L. Mencken's Fraudulent History of the White House Bathtub
10. The End of an Era: New York's Sin Ship

III. Common Themes
11. Chicago's Hoaxes: Beating (and Embarrassing) Your Rivals
12. New England's Gentler Humor (and New York's)
13. Radio and TV Hoaxes: Dolls, Monsters, and Martians
14. April Fools' Hoaxes: Pelicans, Sharks, and Baseball
15. Hoaxing the Hoaxers: Fooling the Media for Fun and Publicity

Epilogue: A Change in Ethics: Firing the Guilty

Appendix: Ben Franklin's Parable against Persecution

.....................................................

A Few Interesting Quotes:

p xix:

"...During the 1860s, for example, about four hundred daily newspapers were published in the United States. By 1900, the number had jumped to two thousand. Cities such as Philadelphia and New York had more than a dozen English-language dailies. As recently as 1933, Washington DC, had five. Only one, the Washington Post, has survived.

...Newspaper jobs were also much different" less respectable, but more adventuresome and carefree. They were low-level, white-collar jobs that attracted the upwardly mobile - immigrants, their children, and the youths raised on farms and in small towns. Newspaper jobs rarely attracted gentlemen. The upper classes thought of newspaper people as drifters and drunkards who led exciting lives but pried into other people's private affairs.

Few of the journalists were well educated. Many had not graduated from high school, and some believed that it was a disadvantage to have graduated from college. Journalists who had attended college sometimes tried to hide that fact "as though it was a stretch in prison." An editor at the Chicago Tribune also discouraged marriage, fearing it would interfere with his staff's work. If a reporter wanted to get married, the editor might threaten to cut the reporter's salary, or even to fire him."

p 147 - reporters regularly had close contact with police and also were known to kidnap witnesses of crimes or even the accused:

"The suspect in another murder was captured by police in Wisconsin. A squad from Hearst's Examiner sped to the town. Posing as Chicago policemen, they flashed fake badges and brought the suspect back to a Chicago hotel. The suspect gave the reporters a detailed statement, and the police and other journalists read it in the Examiner. So their story would remain exclusive, the reporters waited a day or two before returning their prisoner to the Chicago police."

However the book also notes that many of the tales of the Chicago press of the 1900 that were handed down were retold and exaggerated. So it's hard to say that all of the incidents are 100% accurate.

p. 198: "We can't be responsible for people if they are attacked. Besides, anyone foolish enough to believe all this deserves to be eaten."

--from a "spokesman for the National Biological Foundation" from a story in the Herald-News (Roscommon, Michigan) reporting on scientists' experiment of releasing freshwater sharks into three northern Michigan lakes to see if they would breed.

The key bit of info here? The date of publication: April 1, 1981.

And yes, people did believe this story. Even though the final sentence is a huge hint: "Doherty also noted that April 1 is a foolish time to be telling fishy stories."