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| Reviews of the book "The
Catcher was a Spy" |
From The Publisher: 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." From Library Journal: 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. From Stephen Jay Gould - The New York Review of Books:
Among marginalized players once deemed beyond consideration by
conventional hagiography, the lousy performers stand out. Moe
Berg, who played sporadically from 1923 to 1939, was a truly poor
catcher but perhaps the most fascinating character in the history
of baseball. . . . Berg was marginal on all fronts with baseball--a
crummy player, a Jew, and an intellectual. Berg finished both
college and law school, and was a linguist by avocation and partial
hype. . . . I had not expected to like Moe Berg much, for I thought
that all the standard stories of his life had been egregiously
embellished, and that his otherexploits might turn out to be as
mundane as his baseball. Not so, and I thank Dawidoff for the
corrections. Though he thrived on exaggeration, in part concocted
by the press to give him a persona that could transcend his play,
Bergwas a genuinely cultured and accomplished man. From Dick Teresi
- The New York Times Book Review: {This} is a delightful book
that recounts one of the strangest episodes in the history of
espionage. Nicholas Dawidoff, a contributor to Sports Illustrated,
The New Republic and other magazines, has written a painstakingly
researched yet compact biography of the bizarre catcher--a major
league ballplayer,Princeton graduate, amateur linguist, ladies'
man, raconteur, professional freeloader, lawyer, quiz show contestant
and spy. The book is a wild ride through history, combining characters
like Heisenberg, Ted Williams, the O.S.S.'s Wild Bill Donovan,
Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, Julia Child, Nelson Rockefeller and
Chico Marx. It's filled with brilliant scientists, lascivious
outfieldersand truculent geisha girls. As a biography it appears
to lack only one element: a hero. But it has something better.
It has Moe Berg.
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