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."
