Many white readers would rather embrace lunar man-bats than their fellow human beings.
Here's still another stranger-than-fiction story: "The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York" (Basic Books, $26), by Matthew Goodman.
One can read all about it (including the effect the story had on Edgar Allen Poe and P. T. Barnum) in "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.
Uglow tells us, for instance, that the Lunar men were active in the campaign against slavery.
Most of the Lunar men were from non-conformist backgrounds and so not part of an Oxbridge-educated elite.
As the writers of "Saturday Night Live" worked on sketches deep into the night, they were sustained by something like what sustained the Lunar men and the idealists in Tübingen — the feeling that they all spoke a private language.
Their wives chatted in the other room, and the Lunar men talked well into the night, clearing the table to make room for their models and plans and instruments.
With pardonable exaggeration, Ms Uglow in her introduction credits the Lunar men with nothing less than inventing the modern world.In this section Giving account Before there were departments Who's afraid of the new science?
Ms. Uglow writes at length of Wedgwood's ceramics experiments and his involvement along with other Lunar men in planning the canals that were to knit the industrial midlands together.
However, at the heart of the Lunar men's interests lay a driving curiosity in the workings of the natural world (fittingly, they had chosen the full moon to meet because it gave the most light as they stumbled home, drunk on fine ideas and clever talk).
"When I&apos m finished with all this in 10 or 15 years, I wonder, will I have left enough paintings and will I have told the story?" When he was on his moon mission, gamboling about the dusty lunar surface, a man on a scientific mission, he said he did not allow himself to ruminate about what it all meant.
