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Book Cover for: The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, Nicholas Dawidoff

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

Nicholas Dawidoff

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The stories about Moe Berg - his behavior, his intelligence, his charm - are legion, as are the unanswered questions posed by his life. A baseball player and a spy, he was one of the most colorful men to pursue either line of work. He played in the major leagues from 1923 through 1939 and then became a coach for the Boston Red Sox. It was not, however, as a player that Berg earned his highest accolades, but as a dugout savant (it was said that Berg, educated at Princeton, the Sorbonne, and Columbia, could speak a dozen languages but couldn't hit in any of them). A month after Pearl Harbor, the day after his father - who had never approved of Berg's choice of career - died, Berg announced his departure from baseball and entered the world of diplomacy and espionage. But only now has the extent of his work for the OSS in determining Germany's atomic bomb capability been revealed. The Catcher Was a Spy provides one of the few thoroughly documented accounts of a real spy's life. Equally compelling is Nicholas Dawidoff's account of Berg after the war. A secretive man who had a reputation for appearing and disappearing without warning, Berg has long been the subject of wonder and speculation. Behind the enigma of Moe Berg was a life of fantastic and fascinating complexity - a life that has never been pieced together so seamlessly and to such riveting effect as it is now in what David Remnick calls "a stunning biography."

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: May 30th, 1995
  • Pages: 480
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.90in - 5.10in - 1.10in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9780679762898
  • Categories: • Political• Wars & Conflicts - World War II - General• Sports

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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.

More books by Nicholas Dawidoff

Book Cover for: The Fly Swatter: Portrait of an Exceptional Character, Nicholas Dawidoff
Book Cover for: The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City, Nicholas Dawidoff
Book Cover for: In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music, Nicholas Dawidoff
Book Cover for: Collision Low Crossers: Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football, Nicholas Dawidoff
Book Cover for: The Crowd Sounds Happy: The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love and Madness in an American Family, Nicholas Dawidoff

What people are saying

1 year

Berg was proud of his storytelling to the point where he collected stories about telling stories.,Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg,charisma, curiosity, narrative,

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Lockdown Book Detective
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“Would you happen to have a Ben Hur 1860? The third edition, the one with the erratum on page 116.” Don’t follow me on Facebook because I’m not there.

@ratemyskyperoom @BarbMcQuade Three more: BAG MAN: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House; Michael Yarvitz & Rachel Maddow THE CATCHER WAS A SPY: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg; Nicholas Dawidoff (1995) THE BRETHREN; Woodward & Armstrong (1979) https://t.co/BFNy0Mzj5N

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2 years

Your editorially independent source for Harvard news, arts, culture, and more. Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://t.co/uXY0TEoKt4

Writer Nicholas Dawidoff ’85 is justly acclaimed for "The Catcher Was a Spy," "The Fly Swatter ," and "The Crowd Sounds Happy." Now, he has produced a monumental, wrenching account of urban inequity, "The Other Side of Prospect" (@wwnorton). https://t.co/7Gdt4CiUFR https://t.co/SouDtKFASn

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Praise for this book

"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

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