ISBN The Catcher was a Spy

The Catcher was a Spy

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

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.


About author(s)
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 Condé 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. His 2013 book Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football, was a finalist for a PEN America literary award. 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, a Civitella Ranieri, and a Berlin Prize fellow and is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the American Scholar.