The Catcher Was a Spy
The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group · Print & ebook · May 30, 1995
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. . . . .
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- Who it’s for
- A layered portrait of Moe Berg, where baseball biography meets the history and psychology of espionage.
- Genres
- Sports Lives, Intelligence & Espionage, Baseball
- Published
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, May 30, 1995
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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.
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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.
Two Unlikely Careers
A layered portrait of Moe Berg, where baseball biography meets the history and psychology of espionage.
Come here for
- The unlikely overlap of major-league baseball and wartime espionage
- A life traced through sports, intelligence, and carefully built disguises
Expect
- Historical and psychological detective work
- A clear-eyed look at a life of equivocal careers and nomadic years
Where it sits
| Sports Lives | 63% |
|---|---|
| Intelligence & Espionage | 53% |
| Baseball | 42% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Military Lives
- Sports Lives
- World War II History
- Authors
- Nicholas Dawidoff
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- May 30, 1995
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Military Lives