The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

by Nicholas Dawidoff

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Now a major motion picture starring Paul Rudd

“A delightful book that recounts one of the strangest episodes in the history of espionage. . . . . Relentlessly entertaining.”—The New York Times Book Review

Moe Berg is the only major-league baseball player whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA. For Berg was much more than a third-string catcher who played on several major league teams between 1923 and 1939. Educated at Princeton and the Sorbonne, he as reputed to speak a dozen languages (although it was also said he couldn't hit in any of them) and went on to become an OSS spy in Europe during World War II. 

As Nicholas Dawidoff follows Berg from his claustrophobic childhood through his glamorous (though equivocal) careers in sports and espionage and into the long, nomadic years during which he lived on the hospitality of such scattered acquaintances as Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein, he succeeds not only in establishing where Berg went, but who he was beneath his layers of carefully constructed cover. As engrossing as a novel by John le Carré, The Catcher Was a Spy is a triumphant work of historical and psychological detection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679762898
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/30/1995
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	115,645
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of five books. One of them, The Fly Swatter, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and another, In the Country of Country, was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveller. His first book, The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg was a national bestseller and appeared on many 1994 best book lists. In 2009, Pantheon published The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball. He is also the editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology. A graduate of Harvard University, he has been a Guggenheim, Civitella Ranieri and Berlin Prize Fellow, and is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the American Scholar.

Editorial Reviews

A delightful book that recounts one of the strangest episodes in the history of espionage. . . . . Relentlessly entertaining.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] meticulously researched biography. . . . . As Dawidoff tracks his elusive subject…the story becomes more than a search for the core of someone who spent his life making himself a mystery, but a dark, moving human tragedy.”—Los Angeles Times

“[Dawidoff] has done heroic research, much of it in unlit corners. . . . Moe Berg doubtless will forever remain a mystery, but Dawidoff has brought the mystery to life.”—Washington Post

From the Publisher

Dawidoff uncovers the enigmatic life of former major-league catcher Berg, who, following his baseball stint, became a spy for the OSS assigned to find information on Nazi nuclear capabilities. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Baseball catcher, lawyer, and spy-Moe Berg was all of these, but first and foremost he was an enigma. All the ascertainable facts concerning Berg's life are presented here, including his 19 years as the most famous journeyman catcher in professional baseball; his stint at Columbia University and subsequent abortive legal career; his investigation of Germany's atomic bomb program for the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor of the CIA) during World War II; and his postwar years, in which he lived off the kindness of friends. Dawidoff has done a lot of research on a fascinating subject but draws few conclusions, and his overall theme seems to be the impenetrability of his subject. In the end, Berg remains a mystery. A marginal purchase. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/ 94.]-Terry Madden, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.

Library Journal