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The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg
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. 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.
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. 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.
453 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
About the author
Nicholas Dawidoff
17 books45 followersNicholas Dawidoff is the best-selling author of five books, including The Catcher Was a Spy and In the Country of Country. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has been a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, and Art for Justice Fellow. He lives in Connecticut.
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April 29, 2021
Moe Berg
Was he a US spy? A very interesting bio of a Jewish catcher who was (or maybe he wasn't) recruited by the OSS to spy against Germany during WW II.
Nicholas Dawidoff - image from Princeton Alumni Weekly
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Clearly, I was not actually writing reviews way back when I began at GR in 2008. I had read this book five years earlier, in 2003. Not sure what I would do with it today, were I reading it for the first time, but I do well recall that the subject matter was fascinating, and the reality-based content was very surprising and intriguing. Too bad the film seems to have swung and missed on what should have been a fat pitch down the middle.
The Catcher was a Spy was Dawidoff’s first book. He has, since, had a successful writing career, working at Sports Illustrated, Rollingstone, The New Yorker and The New York Times. He authored or edited four more books, the most recent being Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football, released in 2013.
-----June 22, 2018 - Vulture - The Catcher Was a Spy Is Too Discreet for Its Own Good - David Edelstein reviews the just-released film. Both Edelstein and RottenTomatoes reviewers find it to be a passed ball.
Nicholas Dawidoff wrote The Catcher Was a Spy — on a manual typewriter, I should add — while subletting my Village apartment in the early ’90s. He was a fine tenant under trying conditions (i.e., a neighbor who played ghastly original songs at all hours) and my baseball cap is off to him for his subsequent good fortune.Paul Rudd as Moe Berg? Really? Have not seen it so I cannot say it was horribly miscast, and will keep an open mind, but I will watch the movie someday with that expectation.
Paul Rudd as Moe Berg - in the film - image from Borg.com
May 6, 2019
As a baseball fan, I have always bled Cubbie blue without a doubt; yet, my favorite non Cub players have always been Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg. As a Jew with few Jewish stars to cheer for, I get excited every time a Jewish athlete makes headlines. The team Israel entry to the World Baseball Classic two years ago? My son and I woke up diligently at 4:00 to watch their games? Watching the Houston Astros’ Alex Bregman turn into a bonafide star has me kvelling, not to mention seeing Ian Kinsler get traded to the Boston Red Sox last season and then win a World Series ring with the team. Known as people of the book, Jewish stars are few and far between, so I keep my feelers out any time a Jewish athlete does something special, on or off of the playing field. That is why the Moe Berg, a back up catcher during the 1920s and 1930s has always been an intriguing character to me. Recently, there had been a movie produced about Berg’s life, so I jumped at an opportunity to read the book first, The Catcher Was a Spy by Nicholas Dawidoff.
Moe Berg was born in 1901, the third child of Bernard and Rose Berg. Although the Bergs were ethnically Jewish and all who knew them could easily tell by their physical features, Bernard Berg tried to distance himself as much as possible from any Jewish acquaintances. An immigrant, pharmacist, and self made man, Bernard Berg moved his family to the Roseville section of Newark, New Jersey as soon as he had the means to leave the Bronx, a neighborhood that had too many Jews for his liking. His children Sam, Rose, and Morris, all common Jewish names during the generation, attended public school, had few Jewish acquaintances, and did not attend religious school. Bernard pushed his children to achieve, instilling in them that they could make something of themselves in America if they studied and became a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or nurse. Sam and Ethel followed their father’s advice and became a doctor and teacher respectively, but Morris, known as Moe, the most precocious of the three, although a stellar student from an early age, decided that he would achieve great heights by playing baseball.
Although Bernard Berg distanced himself from Jews, he could not understand why his son would rather play a kids’ game than be a scholar. Yet, Moe Berg was a scholar, earning a place in the National Honor Society in high school and earning admission in Princeton University. Bernard Berg wanted his son to be a lawyer yet by the time Moe attended Princeton, he was both a top baseball player and excelling at learning foreign languages. He was also a loner having no close friends and learned how to make himself scarce. One minute, Berg could work a crowd, regaling party goers with his exploits on the baseball diamond, and the next he would have disappeared. By the time Berg graduated Princeton with high marks in 1923 and had offers to play ball from multiple teams, he had already had an eye on his future profession, a spy during World War II. Upon graduation, Berg first played for the Brooklyn Robins, later the Dodgers, as the team sought a Jewish star to appeal to Brooklyn’s population. Yet, Berg could not decide whether to pursue baseball or the law, and, as a result, his ball playing skills fell off.
Moe Berg eventually received his law degree by attending courses at Columbia during off seasons. Yet, his passion was baseball. It was the only profession, he reasoned, where he could travel the country, play a game for three hours a day, and explore cities at his leisure while the rest of his teammates pursued other, unwholesome activities. Berg shattered his knee in 1929, and during the 1930s stayed on major league rosters for the Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox as a third string catcher turned bullpen coach. He established a habit of reading a minimum of ten newspapers a day, walked everywhere, and spoke seven languages well and understood countless other. Berg became known as Professor Berg to sportswriters and developed lifelong relationships with John Kieran of the New York Times and Jerome Holtzman of the Chicago Tribune. Both writers realized that Berg possessed a combination of knowledge and intelligence rare in a major league ball player, and these relationships, as well as his flare for spinning stories kept Berg in the league with Red Sox well after his talents diminished.
Following off season trips to Japan and the Far East after the 1932 and 1934 seasons that allowed Berg to travel the world, he became relatively proficient in Japanese. When the United States entered World War II, Berg enlisted and gained admission into the Office of Secret Service once officers discovered his penchant for languages and secrecy. Moe Berg was born to be a spy, yet, according to Dawidoff, he was not necessarily an adept one. Berg’s key assignment during the war was to engage axis power physicists to see if Germany had learned how to split an atom and develop a bomb. Berg was likable and developed relationships with all the scientists he met, yet also wrote excessively and failed to keep expense accounts. Because all of Dawidoff’s interviews were second hand, as a reader it is tough to know whether Berg’s stories or Dawidoff’s opinions are closer to the truth. Was Berg a key player in the OSS who was denied a career in the CIA or a man on the fringes who the government wanted to rid themselves of once the war years ended? The truth was probably somewhere in between given Berg’s idiosyncratic behavior, yet like the spy he wrote about, Dawidoff’s readers will never know the full truth of Berg’s wartime exploits.
Nicholas Dawidoff wrote The Catcher Was a Spy more than twenty years after Moe Berg’s passing. Most of his family and acquaintances were also dead so the author repeats himself and uses the last hundred pages of the book to mention anecdotes of Berg’s postwar travels. These last hundred pages dragged a bit, and at the essence paint a picture of a man denied the job of his dreams who could not reintegrate into civilian life. Moe Berg was the rare scholarly ball player who was a sportswriter’s dream and spoke more languages than most people could even imagine. Yet, with average ball playing skills and a penchant for being a loner, Berg faded from society until Dawidoff published this volume. While today Jewish kids can look up to Alex Bregman, nearly one hundred years ago Jewish kids were kvelling over the ball playing skills of Moe Berg, a Jew and person who chose to live life on the fringes.
3.5 stars
Moe Berg was born in 1901, the third child of Bernard and Rose Berg. Although the Bergs were ethnically Jewish and all who knew them could easily tell by their physical features, Bernard Berg tried to distance himself as much as possible from any Jewish acquaintances. An immigrant, pharmacist, and self made man, Bernard Berg moved his family to the Roseville section of Newark, New Jersey as soon as he had the means to leave the Bronx, a neighborhood that had too many Jews for his liking. His children Sam, Rose, and Morris, all common Jewish names during the generation, attended public school, had few Jewish acquaintances, and did not attend religious school. Bernard pushed his children to achieve, instilling in them that they could make something of themselves in America if they studied and became a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or nurse. Sam and Ethel followed their father’s advice and became a doctor and teacher respectively, but Morris, known as Moe, the most precocious of the three, although a stellar student from an early age, decided that he would achieve great heights by playing baseball.
Although Bernard Berg distanced himself from Jews, he could not understand why his son would rather play a kids’ game than be a scholar. Yet, Moe Berg was a scholar, earning a place in the National Honor Society in high school and earning admission in Princeton University. Bernard Berg wanted his son to be a lawyer yet by the time Moe attended Princeton, he was both a top baseball player and excelling at learning foreign languages. He was also a loner having no close friends and learned how to make himself scarce. One minute, Berg could work a crowd, regaling party goers with his exploits on the baseball diamond, and the next he would have disappeared. By the time Berg graduated Princeton with high marks in 1923 and had offers to play ball from multiple teams, he had already had an eye on his future profession, a spy during World War II. Upon graduation, Berg first played for the Brooklyn Robins, later the Dodgers, as the team sought a Jewish star to appeal to Brooklyn’s population. Yet, Berg could not decide whether to pursue baseball or the law, and, as a result, his ball playing skills fell off.
Moe Berg eventually received his law degree by attending courses at Columbia during off seasons. Yet, his passion was baseball. It was the only profession, he reasoned, where he could travel the country, play a game for three hours a day, and explore cities at his leisure while the rest of his teammates pursued other, unwholesome activities. Berg shattered his knee in 1929, and during the 1930s stayed on major league rosters for the Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox as a third string catcher turned bullpen coach. He established a habit of reading a minimum of ten newspapers a day, walked everywhere, and spoke seven languages well and understood countless other. Berg became known as Professor Berg to sportswriters and developed lifelong relationships with John Kieran of the New York Times and Jerome Holtzman of the Chicago Tribune. Both writers realized that Berg possessed a combination of knowledge and intelligence rare in a major league ball player, and these relationships, as well as his flare for spinning stories kept Berg in the league with Red Sox well after his talents diminished.
Following off season trips to Japan and the Far East after the 1932 and 1934 seasons that allowed Berg to travel the world, he became relatively proficient in Japanese. When the United States entered World War II, Berg enlisted and gained admission into the Office of Secret Service once officers discovered his penchant for languages and secrecy. Moe Berg was born to be a spy, yet, according to Dawidoff, he was not necessarily an adept one. Berg’s key assignment during the war was to engage axis power physicists to see if Germany had learned how to split an atom and develop a bomb. Berg was likable and developed relationships with all the scientists he met, yet also wrote excessively and failed to keep expense accounts. Because all of Dawidoff’s interviews were second hand, as a reader it is tough to know whether Berg’s stories or Dawidoff’s opinions are closer to the truth. Was Berg a key player in the OSS who was denied a career in the CIA or a man on the fringes who the government wanted to rid themselves of once the war years ended? The truth was probably somewhere in between given Berg’s idiosyncratic behavior, yet like the spy he wrote about, Dawidoff’s readers will never know the full truth of Berg’s wartime exploits.
Nicholas Dawidoff wrote The Catcher Was a Spy more than twenty years after Moe Berg’s passing. Most of his family and acquaintances were also dead so the author repeats himself and uses the last hundred pages of the book to mention anecdotes of Berg’s postwar travels. These last hundred pages dragged a bit, and at the essence paint a picture of a man denied the job of his dreams who could not reintegrate into civilian life. Moe Berg was the rare scholarly ball player who was a sportswriter’s dream and spoke more languages than most people could even imagine. Yet, with average ball playing skills and a penchant for being a loner, Berg faded from society until Dawidoff published this volume. While today Jewish kids can look up to Alex Bregman, nearly one hundred years ago Jewish kids were kvelling over the ball playing skills of Moe Berg, a Jew and person who chose to live life on the fringes.
3.5 stars
September 5, 2008
Baseball and spies. Two of my favorite subjects. I really wanted to like this book. Not only was Moe Berg a catcher for the Red Sox and one of the first Jewish players in baseball, but he also happened to do a little moonlighting in espionage on the side. It should have made for a riveting story, full of twists and turns, savory Cold war nuggets and revealing baseball lore. And in the hands of another author, perhaps it would have. But somehow, in the hands of Nicholas Davidoff, it reads like one of the dry textbooks of Moe Berg's era. Wordy, barren of excitement, the account strips down even the most interesting facts of Berg's life to their most mundane parts. I came away from this book with the belief that Davidoff had done Berg an injustice, which is really ironic considering this is a man with whom Davidoff is clearly obsessed.
April 26, 2024
This is a biography of Moe Berg, a truly fascinating character. He is sometimes said to be the most intelligent person to play major league baseball. Baseball was at the top of the list of his numerous passions for most of his life. He excelled at languages, although it is doubtful he spoke as many languages as the sports papers alleged. Even while a baseball player, he attended Columbia Law School and was hired by a prestigious Wall Street law firm during the offseason as he continued his baseball career. Although he loved the game, he was never a star. For most of his career, he was the bullpen catcher, helping bring along promising rookie pitchers. He made two notable baseball trips to Japan, acquiring a rudimentary knowledge of the language. He covertly filmed Toyko Harbor, and these films were later studied as the US planned the Doolittle Raid.
When his professional baseball career ended in the early 1940s after nineteen seasons, Berg was recruited into the OSS (predecessor to the CIA) and given a number of overseas assignments, first in South America and later in North Africa, England, and Europe. His most challenging assignment was to go into wartime Europe and meet Werner Heisenberg to determine the status of the Nazi's nuclear bomb program. His orders were to assassinate Heisenberg if it appeared the Germans were close to developing an A-bomb. Berg was sneaked into Switzerland to attend a lecture given in German by Heisenberg. Berg was not a nuclear scientist but had been briefed on what to listen for. He determined the Germans were far away from the development of a bomb, so it was not necessary to carry out the killing.
After World War II, Berg was offered baseball managerial jobs but declined. He lived with his sister and later his older brother. During the Cold War, the CIA briefly gave him espionage tasks but never had success (probably because Russian was not a language he spoke).
Berg died in 1972
This book should be read by sports fans, spy fans, and others interested in a complex person like Moe Berg.
When his professional baseball career ended in the early 1940s after nineteen seasons, Berg was recruited into the OSS (predecessor to the CIA) and given a number of overseas assignments, first in South America and later in North Africa, England, and Europe. His most challenging assignment was to go into wartime Europe and meet Werner Heisenberg to determine the status of the Nazi's nuclear bomb program. His orders were to assassinate Heisenberg if it appeared the Germans were close to developing an A-bomb. Berg was sneaked into Switzerland to attend a lecture given in German by Heisenberg. Berg was not a nuclear scientist but had been briefed on what to listen for. He determined the Germans were far away from the development of a bomb, so it was not necessary to carry out the killing.
After World War II, Berg was offered baseball managerial jobs but declined. He lived with his sister and later his older brother. During the Cold War, the CIA briefly gave him espionage tasks but never had success (probably because Russian was not a language he spoke).
Berg died in 1972
This book should be read by sports fans, spy fans, and others interested in a complex person like Moe Berg.
August 13, 2010
I have never read a book that was such a chore to finish.
I felt like making a flow chart to follow all the people and a map to keep track of all the places he went. I found it a very confusing book to read.
Many of the people quoted in the book say what a great story teller Moe Berg was, yet the story is told so poorly by the author. The people also say how secretive Berg was and that most of the time no one knew how he could afford to live let alone what he was doing from day to day and that makes me wonder how the author could write a 365 page book about someone no one knew anything about.
The author did a lot of research for this book and it shows in the amount of information that really brings the enjoyment level down.
I felt like making a flow chart to follow all the people and a map to keep track of all the places he went. I found it a very confusing book to read.
Many of the people quoted in the book say what a great story teller Moe Berg was, yet the story is told so poorly by the author. The people also say how secretive Berg was and that most of the time no one knew how he could afford to live let alone what he was doing from day to day and that makes me wonder how the author could write a 365 page book about someone no one knew anything about.
The author did a lot of research for this book and it shows in the amount of information that really brings the enjoyment level down.
June 14, 2022
The title of this book sounds as if it could have been written by Mickey Spillane but it is in fact a well-crafted story of a little-known ballplayer, Morris "Moe" Berg, an exceedingly enigmatic figure who played baseball almost by default.
But more than a story of a 3rd string, journeyman backstop, The Catcher Was a Spy by Nicholas Dawidoff is a deeply engaging psychological profile of a man personified by the adjective "crepuscular", as shadowy & mysterious as he was intellectually gifted, with a magna cum laude diploma from Princeton, a period of study at the Sorbonne in Paris, a law degree from Columbia & a keen facility with languages.
A baseball scout once said that Moe was fluent in 7 languages (including Sanskrit) but could not hit in any of them. While regarded as a charming & erudite man, he apparently was unable to form meaningful & lasting social connections with others. On occasion, people would be in the midst of a conversation with Moe while walking down a street, only to find that he had suddenly vanished.
Davidoff's research on Moe Berg is seemingly exhaustive but ultimately, some people are largely unknowable, even to themselves. I wonder what a neurologist like Dr. Oliver Sachs or a psychoanalyst might make of Berg? Beyond any clinical evaluation, Moe Berg's consciousness seems to have been haunted by the lack of familial recognition by his father Bernard, a pharmacist, his brother, Dr. Sam & his sister, Ethel.
At every step of his life, Dawidoff turns up examples where those who should have been most open to Moe's against-the-grain or non-traditional behavior, rejected him, examples being when as a Princeton freshman he sent a poem to his brother who spurned it, or when he excelled at sports at college, eventually becoming a major league player while also continuing to work on a law degree at Columbia during the off-season, with his father disdaining Moe's choices in life.
Moe's father seemed not just distant but antagonistic to Moe & the author offers examples of incidents when the son seemed to appeal to his father for love, or at the very least, to be afforded his father's respect, only to be rebuffed. Yes, this would seem to be a portrait of another dysfunctional family but Dawidoff makes the story of Moe Berg very compelling reading.
Among the many attributes that caused Moe Berg to work as a spy most likely include his great intellectual curiosity, his gift for languages, his largely self-taught understanding of physics, his secretive nature + the fact that during an off-season baseball tour of Japan in 1934, Berg had managed to make a clandestine film record of many important buildings in Tokyo.
For "Wild Bill" Donovan, also a former college athlete & Columbia Law graduate, later the head of the OSS during WWII, the predecessor to the CIA, Moe Berg's background & shadowy nature must have seemed a natural fit to perform undercover work, including trailing eminent German physicist Werner Heisenberg at an important conference in Switzerland in an attempt to discern how close Heisenberg & Nazi Germany were to gaining an atomic advantage that might have shifted the course of the war.
This book is a thoughtful & fascinating profile of a man whose life was often a mystery, much more than a story about a baseball player. When asked why someone with such stunning academic credentials played baseball for so many years, Berg responded, "I love it. I could never stop." And according to Nicholas Dawidoff,
Alas, even Moe Berg's end was shrouded in mystery, when his sister Ethel carted off his ashes to a secret location in Israel. This book may represent a depressing tale for some readers at this site but I thank Nicholas Dawidoff for introducing me to Moe Berg. And if the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had somehow played major league baseball, I am sure that he would have found Moe Berg a kindred spirit!
*Photo image #1 of Moe Berg in uniform as a catcher; #2 of the author Nicholas Dawidoff; #3, Berg & American teammates during 1934 baseball tour of Japan; #4, Moe Berg in lawyer's garb.
But more than a story of a 3rd string, journeyman backstop, The Catcher Was a Spy by Nicholas Dawidoff is a deeply engaging psychological profile of a man personified by the adjective "crepuscular", as shadowy & mysterious as he was intellectually gifted, with a magna cum laude diploma from Princeton, a period of study at the Sorbonne in Paris, a law degree from Columbia & a keen facility with languages.
A baseball scout once said that Moe was fluent in 7 languages (including Sanskrit) but could not hit in any of them. While regarded as a charming & erudite man, he apparently was unable to form meaningful & lasting social connections with others. On occasion, people would be in the midst of a conversation with Moe while walking down a street, only to find that he had suddenly vanished.
Davidoff's research on Moe Berg is seemingly exhaustive but ultimately, some people are largely unknowable, even to themselves. I wonder what a neurologist like Dr. Oliver Sachs or a psychoanalyst might make of Berg? Beyond any clinical evaluation, Moe Berg's consciousness seems to have been haunted by the lack of familial recognition by his father Bernard, a pharmacist, his brother, Dr. Sam & his sister, Ethel.
At every step of his life, Dawidoff turns up examples where those who should have been most open to Moe's against-the-grain or non-traditional behavior, rejected him, examples being when as a Princeton freshman he sent a poem to his brother who spurned it, or when he excelled at sports at college, eventually becoming a major league player while also continuing to work on a law degree at Columbia during the off-season, with his father disdaining Moe's choices in life.
Moe's father seemed not just distant but antagonistic to Moe & the author offers examples of incidents when the son seemed to appeal to his father for love, or at the very least, to be afforded his father's respect, only to be rebuffed. Yes, this would seem to be a portrait of another dysfunctional family but Dawidoff makes the story of Moe Berg very compelling reading.
Among the many attributes that caused Moe Berg to work as a spy most likely include his great intellectual curiosity, his gift for languages, his largely self-taught understanding of physics, his secretive nature + the fact that during an off-season baseball tour of Japan in 1934, Berg had managed to make a clandestine film record of many important buildings in Tokyo.
For "Wild Bill" Donovan, also a former college athlete & Columbia Law graduate, later the head of the OSS during WWII, the predecessor to the CIA, Moe Berg's background & shadowy nature must have seemed a natural fit to perform undercover work, including trailing eminent German physicist Werner Heisenberg at an important conference in Switzerland in an attempt to discern how close Heisenberg & Nazi Germany were to gaining an atomic advantage that might have shifted the course of the war.
This book is a thoughtful & fascinating profile of a man whose life was often a mystery, much more than a story about a baseball player. When asked why someone with such stunning academic credentials played baseball for so many years, Berg responded, "I love it. I could never stop." And according to Nicholas Dawidoff,
Over 19 seasons, it was an affection that had evolved, the way some marriages do, from passion to comfort. Baseball served Moe Berg well. It afforded him a lifestyle that he liked & offered him a center that he needed. For, if he was prepared for something, had been told what to look for, was carrying instructions, he was fine, even creative. Without guidance from a textbook, or a teacher, or a coach, or a parent, or a general, however, he grew confused & retreated.After leaving baseball, Moe Berg lost his center of gravity as it were & was never able to establish himself in a career or with a woman in spite of several attempts & often even lacked an address, though his brother & sister eventually both provided Moe with a spare room in Newark late in his life. Joe DiMaggio and the Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman among others, also occasionally provided Moe with a room, meals & tickets to baseball games.
Alas, even Moe Berg's end was shrouded in mystery, when his sister Ethel carted off his ashes to a secret location in Israel. This book may represent a depressing tale for some readers at this site but I thank Nicholas Dawidoff for introducing me to Moe Berg. And if the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had somehow played major league baseball, I am sure that he would have found Moe Berg a kindred spirit!
*Photo image #1 of Moe Berg in uniform as a catcher; #2 of the author Nicholas Dawidoff; #3, Berg & American teammates during 1934 baseball tour of Japan; #4, Moe Berg in lawyer's garb.
July 14, 2022
The Catcher was a Spy isn’t really about baseball or espionage. Instead, it is an in depth examination of Moe Berg, an American eccentric whose odd, secretive life was as fascinating as it was unusual.
The first half of that life was devoted to baseball. Moe, a good field, no hit bench warmer, “made a life for himself as that consummate baseball mediocrity, the third-string catcher.” Yet he managed to be something of a baseball celebrity because of his value to sportswriters. Berg was an alumnus of Princeton, had earned a Law degree from Columbia, and had studied at The Sorbonne. To sportswriters, he was Professor Berg, wiz kid of the diamond, and was always good for a story to fill a column. They were particularly entranced by his alleged linguistic skill, a typical story reading:
“the most famous linguist in baseball with his command of languages variously put at from 7 to 27...he laughs off the idea that he gives signs in Hindu, and declares that Yiddish will usually suffice.”
His teammates quips at his expense made good copy as well:
“He speaks seven languages
And can’t hit in any of them.”
After his 19 season baseball career came to a close, Berg launched into a great second act. World War II has begun. The United States had established its first espionage organization, The OSS. Berg’s skill set was a good match for the new, free-wheeling spy agency. Now, instead of catching Lefty Grove, he was attempting to ferret out the secrets of the supposed Nazis atomic bomb program. At one point, he was sent to Switzerland where German scientists and suspected head of the Nazi atomic program, Werner Heisenberg was speaking. He was armed with a pistol, authorized to assassinate Heisenberg if it appeared to be necessary.
Nicholas Dawidoff’s book can be roughly divided into thirds. The first third (the most interesting) concentrates on Berg’s early years and life in baseball. It paints a charming picture of a one of a kind baseball eccentric, surrounded by the players and the ambiance of 1920s and 1930s baseball. The second third, being about espionage, obviously is less detailed, but still interesting. Berg moves through Europe, deep in the secrets of the emerging atomic program, and a favorite of OSS founder Wild Bill Donovan. It is the last third where Dawidoff stumbles. The final 25 years of Berg’s life were spent as a kind of glorified bum. He didn’t work, but traveled from city to city, living off the charity of acquaintances, paying his way with embellished stories of his life. This period is sadly pathetic, yet the author gives it as much ink as the baseball and espionage years.
The author’s failing was being too fascinated by his subject. It’s not that there was no interest in Berg’s later years of eccentric, secretive roaming, implying that he was still a spy in deep cover while his existence spiraled downward. It’s just that it could have been handled with far less detail.Dawidoff writes well, and his book was well researched, but it seems that every scrap of that research found its way into his book. Unless it happens that your level of obsession with Berg’s story is equal to the author’s, it’s likely that your interest will run out before this book does.
The first half of that life was devoted to baseball. Moe, a good field, no hit bench warmer, “made a life for himself as that consummate baseball mediocrity, the third-string catcher.” Yet he managed to be something of a baseball celebrity because of his value to sportswriters. Berg was an alumnus of Princeton, had earned a Law degree from Columbia, and had studied at The Sorbonne. To sportswriters, he was Professor Berg, wiz kid of the diamond, and was always good for a story to fill a column. They were particularly entranced by his alleged linguistic skill, a typical story reading:
“the most famous linguist in baseball with his command of languages variously put at from 7 to 27...he laughs off the idea that he gives signs in Hindu, and declares that Yiddish will usually suffice.”
His teammates quips at his expense made good copy as well:
“He speaks seven languages
And can’t hit in any of them.”
After his 19 season baseball career came to a close, Berg launched into a great second act. World War II has begun. The United States had established its first espionage organization, The OSS. Berg’s skill set was a good match for the new, free-wheeling spy agency. Now, instead of catching Lefty Grove, he was attempting to ferret out the secrets of the supposed Nazis atomic bomb program. At one point, he was sent to Switzerland where German scientists and suspected head of the Nazi atomic program, Werner Heisenberg was speaking. He was armed with a pistol, authorized to assassinate Heisenberg if it appeared to be necessary.
Nicholas Dawidoff’s book can be roughly divided into thirds. The first third (the most interesting) concentrates on Berg’s early years and life in baseball. It paints a charming picture of a one of a kind baseball eccentric, surrounded by the players and the ambiance of 1920s and 1930s baseball. The second third, being about espionage, obviously is less detailed, but still interesting. Berg moves through Europe, deep in the secrets of the emerging atomic program, and a favorite of OSS founder Wild Bill Donovan. It is the last third where Dawidoff stumbles. The final 25 years of Berg’s life were spent as a kind of glorified bum. He didn’t work, but traveled from city to city, living off the charity of acquaintances, paying his way with embellished stories of his life. This period is sadly pathetic, yet the author gives it as much ink as the baseball and espionage years.
The author’s failing was being too fascinated by his subject. It’s not that there was no interest in Berg’s later years of eccentric, secretive roaming, implying that he was still a spy in deep cover while his existence spiraled downward. It’s just that it could have been handled with far less detail.Dawidoff writes well, and his book was well researched, but it seems that every scrap of that research found its way into his book. Unless it happens that your level of obsession with Berg’s story is equal to the author’s, it’s likely that your interest will run out before this book does.
March 26, 2012
There is a reason this book was $6.50 at a used book store. It should have been a magazine article. On the surface the idea of a book about a baseball player who also was a spy was very intriguing. However, Moe Berg was neither a great baseball player nor a great spy. Granted it was still a cool story but one that was so meticulously research and told that it was very boring. The problem with the story was the lack or real conflict. At no time was Berg ever really in trouble with no issues to overcome or resolve. It is impressive that Berg managed to never really get a job in his whole life and having the amount of time to pursue reading and travel must have been great for him, but not so much for the reader. I really struggled to get through this one and most of the second half of the book did not enjoy turning the pages. I rarely recommend not reading a book but this is one of the few I would completely steer clear of if I were a potential reader.
March 24, 2017
If my experience is any indication, the reader is that once maddened by Berg's insistence on fashioning a persona rather than applying himself in a straightforward way AND fascinated by the persona he created.
SECOND READING: Less exasperation and more fascination this time, which is perhaps a function of time and experience on my part rather than any "changes" in this deceased subject. Moe Berg is fascinating in his own right. I love his determination to be himself and to live a life of the mind that will not constrict itself to circumstance or bank balance.
SECOND READING: Less exasperation and more fascination this time, which is perhaps a function of time and experience on my part rather than any "changes" in this deceased subject. Moe Berg is fascinating in his own right. I love his determination to be himself and to live a life of the mind that will not constrict itself to circumstance or bank balance.
June 10, 2015
One of the dullest books I've ever read.
Part of the problem is that it's so well-researched. Berg went to London for two weeks, where, wearing his usual white shirt, grey suit and black tie, he stayed at the Claridge Hotel and dined with this person and that person, although he did not submit timely expense accounts, and then he disappeared for two weeks, turning up in Stockholm, where he dined with this scientist and still did not submit his expense accounts -- while wearing his usual white shirt, grey suit and black tie.
Just a fantastic amount of work must have gone into researching that. But:
Who cares. And that's toward the end of his active spying at the end of WWII, before we get onto Moe didn't know what to do with the rest of his life so he didn't really do much.
It's not so much a narrative -- he's repeatedly portrayed as wildly charming but almost none of that charm comes across in the book ... he's discriminated against in a general, WASPish way in Princeton, but then having gone to Princeton opens doors for him with the OSS -- as it is a laundry list of an interesting but obscure life. The repeated inability to pull back that obfuscation leaves the reader a little puzzled even at the end about the subject of the book and eventually leaves one scratching one's head about why it's such a subject of focus: Berg went here but we don't know why; Berg went there but didn't talk about it. If you are happy making up exciting things Berg might have been doing during the lapses, the book's likely a better read.
I wanted very much to read and like this book. All I can say is I read it.
Part of the problem is that it's so well-researched. Berg went to London for two weeks, where, wearing his usual white shirt, grey suit and black tie, he stayed at the Claridge Hotel and dined with this person and that person, although he did not submit timely expense accounts, and then he disappeared for two weeks, turning up in Stockholm, where he dined with this scientist and still did not submit his expense accounts -- while wearing his usual white shirt, grey suit and black tie.
Just a fantastic amount of work must have gone into researching that. But:
Who cares. And that's toward the end of his active spying at the end of WWII, before we get onto Moe didn't know what to do with the rest of his life so he didn't really do much.
It's not so much a narrative -- he's repeatedly portrayed as wildly charming but almost none of that charm comes across in the book ... he's discriminated against in a general, WASPish way in Princeton, but then having gone to Princeton opens doors for him with the OSS -- as it is a laundry list of an interesting but obscure life. The repeated inability to pull back that obfuscation leaves the reader a little puzzled even at the end about the subject of the book and eventually leaves one scratching one's head about why it's such a subject of focus: Berg went here but we don't know why; Berg went there but didn't talk about it. If you are happy making up exciting things Berg might have been doing during the lapses, the book's likely a better read.
I wanted very much to read and like this book. All I can say is I read it.
January 27, 2012
The Catcher was a spy: the secret life of Moe Berg by Nicholas Dawidoff is a biography on the famous catcher Moe Berg. Throughout the book you start with the smart young Morris Berg, and learn about his amazing learning ability. As Moe grows up we learn about his passion for baseball and see him play for Princeton, The Red Soxs, Dodgers, and many other big league teams. As he grows he learns his real calling in baseball is to be a catcher, rather than the shortstop position he had previously made. In the 1940’s Moe Berg found a job that suited him perfectly, and that was being a spy. He was a very mysterious man and no one every truly knew the real Moe Berg.
This book helped me understand a lot more about World War two. During Hitler’s A Bomb scare Moe was a spy who was sent to track down any information he could on the bomb, and the scientist. The scientist in charge was Dr. Werner Heisenberg, he was a German scientist who refused to leave Germany, but was anti-Nazi. He followed clues trying to figure out where Heisenberg was, which allowed Berg to do what he loved most, travel. During Moe’s many missions, they would periodically lose touch with him for weeks to even months, and the next ting you’d know Moe was back after spending a ton of money and claiming what he did was top secret. Moe was extremely good at his job. He received extremely important Intel that helped the US. He found out that Hitler’s A Bomb was just a hoax, and saved Dr.Heisenberg’s life, there were many ideas to end Heisenberg’s life, and Berg nearly did himself, but he made a choice and decided that the Doctor was not a Nazi, just a very nationalistic German, and spared the doctors life. There were also talks of having him kidnapped and brought to the US, although they were considered they never really happened. Berg did meet Hiesenberg once, he listened to a molecular physics lecture that Moe had to use to Judge wither or not Hiesenberg was a threat, in the end he was not.
Moe was extremely secretive; the author quotes a huge Moe berg fan whom followed him for years. Owen a fan who tracked most of moe's life says “I don’t know him now. I don’t know if anybody knows Moe Berg. He kept secrets from everybody. Nobody’ll ever know him.” (Pages 4-5). The author’s bias for writing the book was that he wanted to show the world who the real Moe Berg was; everyone knew a different side of him. He was completely different person with his family, his friends, his teammates and in the OSS. He always kept what he felt to himself, he was a very self-conscience man, he was Jewish and had to deal with some anti-Semitism at his college Princeton, and when he played baseball. When growing up his dad tried to hide their beliefs while trying to keep them at the same time. This confused him a lot, and helped created what seems to be a social phobia although it’s odd. Moe was scared to tell people too much of himself, yet he was more than happy to pose for pictures, and always knew how to speak and react to people. Other people always had no problem opening up to berg and becoming quick friends, although his friendships never lasted long. I’ve learned a lot about Moe Berg, he has become one of my favorite people throughout reading this book, and even though no one will ever truly know a hundred percent of Moe Berg I feel like I'm close to it and I relate to him on many different aspects of life. Moe Berg was a well-liked, well known, and knowledgeable man.
This book helped me understand a lot more about World War two. During Hitler’s A Bomb scare Moe was a spy who was sent to track down any information he could on the bomb, and the scientist. The scientist in charge was Dr. Werner Heisenberg, he was a German scientist who refused to leave Germany, but was anti-Nazi. He followed clues trying to figure out where Heisenberg was, which allowed Berg to do what he loved most, travel. During Moe’s many missions, they would periodically lose touch with him for weeks to even months, and the next ting you’d know Moe was back after spending a ton of money and claiming what he did was top secret. Moe was extremely good at his job. He received extremely important Intel that helped the US. He found out that Hitler’s A Bomb was just a hoax, and saved Dr.Heisenberg’s life, there were many ideas to end Heisenberg’s life, and Berg nearly did himself, but he made a choice and decided that the Doctor was not a Nazi, just a very nationalistic German, and spared the doctors life. There were also talks of having him kidnapped and brought to the US, although they were considered they never really happened. Berg did meet Hiesenberg once, he listened to a molecular physics lecture that Moe had to use to Judge wither or not Hiesenberg was a threat, in the end he was not.
Moe was extremely secretive; the author quotes a huge Moe berg fan whom followed him for years. Owen a fan who tracked most of moe's life says “I don’t know him now. I don’t know if anybody knows Moe Berg. He kept secrets from everybody. Nobody’ll ever know him.” (Pages 4-5). The author’s bias for writing the book was that he wanted to show the world who the real Moe Berg was; everyone knew a different side of him. He was completely different person with his family, his friends, his teammates and in the OSS. He always kept what he felt to himself, he was a very self-conscience man, he was Jewish and had to deal with some anti-Semitism at his college Princeton, and when he played baseball. When growing up his dad tried to hide their beliefs while trying to keep them at the same time. This confused him a lot, and helped created what seems to be a social phobia although it’s odd. Moe was scared to tell people too much of himself, yet he was more than happy to pose for pictures, and always knew how to speak and react to people. Other people always had no problem opening up to berg and becoming quick friends, although his friendships never lasted long. I’ve learned a lot about Moe Berg, he has become one of my favorite people throughout reading this book, and even though no one will ever truly know a hundred percent of Moe Berg I feel like I'm close to it and I relate to him on many different aspects of life. Moe Berg was a well-liked, well known, and knowledgeable man.
August 9, 2016
#4 This book is quite possibly a hundred billion times better than the Awakening, almost as good as the Catcher in the Rye, better than the Great Gatsby, better than the Crucible, and not quite as good as small portion that we read of the Things We Carried, just to put this book in perspective with the others we have read this year. In this book, there is a "dream" portrayed. Moe Berg loved playing baseball more than anything else in his world. It made him happy just to be around the game, even if he didn't play. If possible, he would have continued to stay involved in baseball until he died, but because of the other endeavors he took on in his life, that idea was not feasible. As a first generation American Jew, his father set high standards for him, and so did society. He was expected to be very intelligent and do great things. But what was expected of him was far below what he accomplished in his life.
Moe Berg became the best baseball player ever to graduate from Princeton, one of the best lawyers of his time, and one of the greatest intellectuals of his time. He had theoretical conversations with Albert Einstein, and played in the Major Leagues for 20 years. That is successful in any society. Fortunately for Moe Berg, he was able to adapt to many different cultures and remember everything he saw, read or heard. He was quite possibly the most succesful man in the widest range of expertise of this past century. The only fault he carried was the slight awkwardness when trying to keep himself busy when speaking to someone he did not like or thought was unintelligent. Besides this one small fault, moslty everything else Moe Berg participated in, he excelled and mastered. Moe Berg was succeful.
#2 Moe Berg is a very complicated character who reveals little of his true personality. He is a man who has a wide breadth of knowledge and he increasing that range everyday. I am someone who likes to talk to people and listen to what they have to say, while disecting what is really going on behind a facade of knowledge such as Berg. So therefore, yes, I would enjoy talking to Moe Berg. He is a baseball player and I am a baseball player. He is a catcher and I am a catcher. We match up very well.
I enjoy watching people and disecting what their true story is without any prior knowledge. Berg is a spy who can charm any person into revealing information. Berg is someone I would really enjoy listening and talking to because of his expansive knowledge of quite a few of the things I love. He could enlighten me onto how it is to hit a Major League fastball and what it's like to get caught in customs in Russia. Moe Berg is someone I would definitely hit it off with.
Moe Berg became the best baseball player ever to graduate from Princeton, one of the best lawyers of his time, and one of the greatest intellectuals of his time. He had theoretical conversations with Albert Einstein, and played in the Major Leagues for 20 years. That is successful in any society. Fortunately for Moe Berg, he was able to adapt to many different cultures and remember everything he saw, read or heard. He was quite possibly the most succesful man in the widest range of expertise of this past century. The only fault he carried was the slight awkwardness when trying to keep himself busy when speaking to someone he did not like or thought was unintelligent. Besides this one small fault, moslty everything else Moe Berg participated in, he excelled and mastered. Moe Berg was succeful.
#2 Moe Berg is a very complicated character who reveals little of his true personality. He is a man who has a wide breadth of knowledge and he increasing that range everyday. I am someone who likes to talk to people and listen to what they have to say, while disecting what is really going on behind a facade of knowledge such as Berg. So therefore, yes, I would enjoy talking to Moe Berg. He is a baseball player and I am a baseball player. He is a catcher and I am a catcher. We match up very well.
I enjoy watching people and disecting what their true story is without any prior knowledge. Berg is a spy who can charm any person into revealing information. Berg is someone I would really enjoy listening and talking to because of his expansive knowledge of quite a few of the things I love. He could enlighten me onto how it is to hit a Major League fastball and what it's like to get caught in customs in Russia. Moe Berg is someone I would definitely hit it off with.
May 18, 2013
After his career ends, a major league baseball player becomes a spy for the U.S. government. If that isn't unusual enough, the baseball player/spy is extremely smart and extremely eccentric.
Moe Berg was the brainy son of a pharmacist. He was admitted to Princeton in 1925 and became a star baseball player there. He went on to play for the Dodgers, Red Sox, and White Sox while obtaining his law degree from Columbia.
He volunteered for government service in World War II and eventually joined the Office of Strategic Services, which was the government spy agency.
While in Europe, he became close friends with a physicist in Switzerland who was knowledgeable about German weapons research. Berg relayed valuable information about German efforts to develop an atomic bomb.
After the war, though, Berg was forced out of the spy business. He spent the next 25 years as a house and dinner guest of friends and relatives. He pretended that his espionage work continued. What he actually was doing was... nothing.
25 years of doing nothing doesn't make for very interesting reading. The latter part of the book is simply a recitation of anecdotes illustrating Berg's odd behavior (along with that of his goofball siblings). Made me wonder if as children, the Bergs got into Dad's pharmaceuticals.
Moe Berg was the brainy son of a pharmacist. He was admitted to Princeton in 1925 and became a star baseball player there. He went on to play for the Dodgers, Red Sox, and White Sox while obtaining his law degree from Columbia.
He volunteered for government service in World War II and eventually joined the Office of Strategic Services, which was the government spy agency.
While in Europe, he became close friends with a physicist in Switzerland who was knowledgeable about German weapons research. Berg relayed valuable information about German efforts to develop an atomic bomb.
After the war, though, Berg was forced out of the spy business. He spent the next 25 years as a house and dinner guest of friends and relatives. He pretended that his espionage work continued. What he actually was doing was... nothing.
25 years of doing nothing doesn't make for very interesting reading. The latter part of the book is simply a recitation of anecdotes illustrating Berg's odd behavior (along with that of his goofball siblings). Made me wonder if as children, the Bergs got into Dad's pharmaceuticals.
May 31, 2018
Fascinating. Compelling. Intriguing.
True of the book and it's subject as well. Moe Berg:
-once was asked to show up at the IRS offices to explain his taxes. He handed the staff member a piece of paper with a phone number on it. The staff member's boss dialed, a man answered, and just like that, all of Berg's tax inquiries were null.
-Berg talked to his fellow outfielder about plays. In Latin.
-He had a degree in law, went to Sorbonne and Princeton, and spoke 7 languages.
-He attemtped to explain baseball to Albert Einstein.
And yes, he was a spy in Europe to find out if Germany had an atomic bomb in production.
The author prseumes to have too much insight into Berg's mentality. "He was too terrified to..." "He must have..." When he speaks to the facts (and his impressive list of interviews and sources", he tells an intriguing tale.
To his credit, Dawidoff does not focus solely on Berg's baseball and wartime deeds. He also goes into detail the later part in Berg's life. Hernias, free-loading, book-hoarding; they all get their due.
In the end, one puts down the book being fascinating by Berg; but never fully understanding the enigmatic man. Which would have been fine with Moe Berg.
True of the book and it's subject as well. Moe Berg:
-once was asked to show up at the IRS offices to explain his taxes. He handed the staff member a piece of paper with a phone number on it. The staff member's boss dialed, a man answered, and just like that, all of Berg's tax inquiries were null.
-Berg talked to his fellow outfielder about plays. In Latin.
-He had a degree in law, went to Sorbonne and Princeton, and spoke 7 languages.
-He attemtped to explain baseball to Albert Einstein.
And yes, he was a spy in Europe to find out if Germany had an atomic bomb in production.
The author prseumes to have too much insight into Berg's mentality. "He was too terrified to..." "He must have..." When he speaks to the facts (and his impressive list of interviews and sources", he tells an intriguing tale.
To his credit, Dawidoff does not focus solely on Berg's baseball and wartime deeds. He also goes into detail the later part in Berg's life. Hernias, free-loading, book-hoarding; they all get their due.
In the end, one puts down the book being fascinating by Berg; but never fully understanding the enigmatic man. Which would have been fine with Moe Berg.
March 15, 2015
The Catcher Was a Spy
By
N. Dawidoff
This book, first published in 1994, is not just about a brilliant, secular Jewish baseball star who also went on to become a U.S. spy for the OSS during WW II. More so, it is an in-depth biography of a strange but lovable character who proves to be just one of a family with similar traits of eccentricity. Here are some examples: “The younger reporters, in turn, were baffled by Berg. They wondered what he did with his time, snickered that he was a ‘freeloader’ and behind his back referred to him as ‘the world’s greatest guest.’“ The Chicago baseball writer, Jerome Holtzman, said, “People used to call him Mysterious Moe… I told him after five years, Moe, the only mystery about you is that you don’t work, and nobody knows it.”
At the end of the story there is a trenchant analysis of Moe’s relationships with his siblings and his father, confirming how dysfunctional the family really was. Considering Moe’s exceptional talents, strange personality and ritualistic behavior, it makes you wonder if he may have had a mild form of Aspberger’s Syndrome.
By
N. Dawidoff
This book, first published in 1994, is not just about a brilliant, secular Jewish baseball star who also went on to become a U.S. spy for the OSS during WW II. More so, it is an in-depth biography of a strange but lovable character who proves to be just one of a family with similar traits of eccentricity. Here are some examples: “The younger reporters, in turn, were baffled by Berg. They wondered what he did with his time, snickered that he was a ‘freeloader’ and behind his back referred to him as ‘the world’s greatest guest.’“ The Chicago baseball writer, Jerome Holtzman, said, “People used to call him Mysterious Moe… I told him after five years, Moe, the only mystery about you is that you don’t work, and nobody knows it.”
At the end of the story there is a trenchant analysis of Moe’s relationships with his siblings and his father, confirming how dysfunctional the family really was. Considering Moe’s exceptional talents, strange personality and ritualistic behavior, it makes you wonder if he may have had a mild form of Aspberger’s Syndrome.
November 19, 2020
Interesting look at as very interesting guy. Moe Berg was a catcher for the pros. He loved baseball and it allowed him to travel. He also had a law degree and could speak several languages. He graduated from Princeton and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year. He read several papers a day and many books on all subjects. During WWII, he was a spy under Donovan's OSS, trying to find out about Hitler's atomic bomb. Berg was very inventive and free-wheeling, sometimes they weren't sure where he was, but he always turned up. He began studying physics and attended many conferences during the war where scientists were meeting. They often believed he was one of them - or an assistant to a scientist.
An amazing, multi-talented guy who did what he wanted and followed his own star (or tried to). He father intensely disliked his preference for sports and never went to one of his games. His siblings obeyed his father, but I don't think there was much harmony in the family.
An amazing, multi-talented guy who did what he wanted and followed his own star (or tried to). He father intensely disliked his preference for sports and never went to one of his games. His siblings obeyed his father, but I don't think there was much harmony in the family.
January 6, 2021
Moe Berg (1902-72) was one of the most confounding men who ever donned a glove in Major League Baseball. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, earned a law degree from Columbia, and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. Berg had a fair command of six foreign languages and could understand many more. He pored through up to ten daily newspapers and wore one of eight identical black suits every day. And during World War II, after a nineteen-year career as a catcher for a succession of American League teams, he enlisted in the OSS and pulled off one of the agency’s most spectacular espionage coups. But nearly all this information has come out elsewhere. If that’s all there were to the story, a biography of Moe Berg wouldn’t be worth reading.
Yet, there was much more to the man. Beyond the superficial facts, no one knew him. He never married and had no close friends. Even his brother and sister found him mysterious. Happily, Nicholas Dawidoff dug deeply into the man’s past and revealed what few knew about him. His biography of Moe Berg, The Catcher Was a Spy, is outstanding.
Dawidoff’s biography of Moe Berg is organized conventionally, relating the story of the man’s curious life in roughly chronological order.
Early life as the son of immigrants
Morris, known as Moe from the start, was the youngest of three children of hard-working Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who had moved to a Christian neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. Berg was a prodigy of sorts, learning to read almost from the time he started talking. He was an outstanding student and gained admission to Princeton. There, once again a Jew isolated among Christians, he proved himself to be a star student. He studied philology and phonetics and picked up numerous languages.
But Berg gained fame at Princeton as a shortstop on the baseball diamond. He was “the best baseball player in the school’s history.” The press took notice, but his father didn’t. In fact, throughout Berg’s life, the old man didn’t attend a single one of the baseball games Berg played in. Bernard Berg was disdainful of sports and pressured his son to leave baseball to become a lawyer.
19-year baseball career
Berg’s standout performance at Princeton gained him a berth with the Brooklyn Dodgers, then known as the Robins. During the nineteen seasons that ensued, he played for a succession of professional teams, most of the time as a catcher. Although he demonstrated early flashes of stardom, those episodes were brief and rare. Most of the time he was a benchwarmer who rarely ventured onto the field.
“The brainiest man in baseball”
Moe Berg was “The brainiest man in baseball.” As his obituary in the New York Times noted, “‘He can speak 10 languages,’ his friends used to joke, ‘but he can’t hit in any of them.'” However, managers kept him on the roster because he boosted team morale as a friend and sometime mentor to other players, enthralling them with stories about his adventures in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. And it surely didn’t hurt that he was a magnet for sportswriters, too. “Every day Berg sat in the dugout before the game and told stories to crowds of reporters.” The press couldn’t get enough of “Professor Berg.” In fact, as this perceptive biography of Moe Berg makes clear, it was the press, and especially the New York Times sports columnist John Kieran, who “created the public Berg.”
“A life of abiding strangeness”
“There were crumbs of truth in every story,” Dawidoff notes, “yet the jolly world of Professor Berg was false at the center. This was not the man, it was caricature on a grand scale. Which didn’t bother Berg. In fact, he encouraged the burlesque and guided the creation of this shimmering distortion.” The reality was starkly different. “Berg’s was a life of abiding strangeness. The secret world of Moe Berg was charming and seamy, vivid and unsettling, wonderful and sad.”
Familiarity with at least 16 languages
Berg’s command of languages was endlessly fascinating to those around him, but exaggerations abounded. Press reports variously credited him with speaking—fluently, of course—anywhere from ten to twenty-seven languages. In fact, when he applied to the OSS much later, “Berg lists his French, Spanish, and Portuguese as ‘fair,’ and his Italian, German, and Japanese as ‘slight.'” However, Dawidoff reports that “during his life he also took a passing interest in, among other languages, Russian, Polish, Mandarin, Chinese, Arabic, Old High German, and Bulgarian.” And at various points throughout this book, Dawidoff also has Berg speaking Greek and Latin and reading Sanskrit (which was not a spoken language).
War work for the OSS
Moe Berg’s fame as a spy rests on a single encounter with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who headed Nazi Germany’s quest for an atomic bomb. The OSS had dispatched him to Switzerland in December 1944. There, he was to attend a lecture by Werner Heisenberg and attempt to ascertain whether the Nazis were on the verge of building a bomb—or even had one already. He had been tutored in nuclear physics and devoured books on the subject in preparation—to such an extent that some physicists expressed amazement with his understanding. If Berg determined the Germans were on track to a bomb, he was to stand up in the lecture hall, pull out a revolver he’d been issued, and shoot Heisenberg.
His most famous exploit was a bust
Fortunately, there was not even a hint in the physicist’s lecture that he was even engaged in nuclear research, and Berg left the man in peace. Ironically, Heisenberg was indeed conducting research in nuclear physics. But he was struggling against scientific roadblocks and interference by Nazi functionaries. And the Allies had already received through other means abundant evidence that the Nazi atomic bomb program was floundering, years behind the Manhattan Project. But of course Berg didn’t know any of this, and nor did his handlers in the OSS.
Befriending prominent German, Swiss, and French scientists
Some of Berg’s other work for the OSS was of greater consequence for the war effort and the Allies’ postwar scientific research efforts. Berg was detailed to the Allies’ Alsos Mission, which had been organized primarily to dig up information about the Nazi bomb project but secondarily to connect with Axis scientists, learn whether they were developing biological or chemical weapons, secure Nazi supplies of uranium and heavy water, and begin the process of enticing the best scientists to move to Britain or the United States. Berg clashed with Colonel Boris Pash, the commander of the Alsos Mission, and operated independently as a consequence. But it was his efforts befriending prominent German, Swiss, and French scientists that helped lure them westward as the war wound down. Pash and his team were less successful.
Life after World War II
Berg lived for twenty-five years after he left the OSS in 1947. Although he doggedly hid the information from everyone outside his family, he lived with his brother “Dr. Sam” from 1947 to 1964 and then, after Dr. Sam kicked him out, with his spinster sister Ethel until his death in 1972. In succession, his two siblings housed, fed, and dressed him and gave him money for his nearly incessant travel and incidentals. But neither of them could figure him out. At one point during the war, “Berg [had] brought Chico Marx along for dinner [with his brother] one evening. Sam hadn’t known that his brother socialized with the Marx brothers, but Berg wasn’t explaining that, either.” In fact, Berg was a celebrity of sorts and connected with a great many luminaries of the era. He even spent a couple of lively afternoons on a visit to Princeton talking about baseball and relativity with Albert Einstein. It seems he could speak about nearly any subject at length and in detail—and in several languages.
Berg was not among the one out of ten OSS employees asked to join the new CIA in 1947. Under wartime conditions and Bill Donovan‘s undisciplined management, the OSS had been a freewheeling operation that tolerated Berg’s eccentricities and his occasional disappearances. The CIA would not. Apart from a few brief stretches when the agency later hired him on a contract basis, and for other short periods when friends employed him as a way to support him, he never worked for the rest of his life.
What might a psychiatrist say about this man’s life?
At some ill-defined point, eccentricity crosses the line into mental illness. I’m no psychiatrist—my brother is the shrink in the family—but it seems clear to me that Moe Berg was ill for a great many years. Dawidoff doesn’t indulge the temptation to engage in psychological speculation. Like other writers, he repeatedly refers to Berg as eccentric. But surely the man’s surpassingly strange behavior over a quarter-century following the war would merit a psychiatric evaluation. You might well imagine that a biography of Moe Berg would include such speculation.
About the author
The Catcher Was a Spy was the first of Nicholas Dawidoff‘s six nonfiction books to date, one of four about professional American sports. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard and a former Guggenheim Fellow.
Yet, there was much more to the man. Beyond the superficial facts, no one knew him. He never married and had no close friends. Even his brother and sister found him mysterious. Happily, Nicholas Dawidoff dug deeply into the man’s past and revealed what few knew about him. His biography of Moe Berg, The Catcher Was a Spy, is outstanding.
Dawidoff’s biography of Moe Berg is organized conventionally, relating the story of the man’s curious life in roughly chronological order.
Early life as the son of immigrants
Morris, known as Moe from the start, was the youngest of three children of hard-working Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who had moved to a Christian neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. Berg was a prodigy of sorts, learning to read almost from the time he started talking. He was an outstanding student and gained admission to Princeton. There, once again a Jew isolated among Christians, he proved himself to be a star student. He studied philology and phonetics and picked up numerous languages.
But Berg gained fame at Princeton as a shortstop on the baseball diamond. He was “the best baseball player in the school’s history.” The press took notice, but his father didn’t. In fact, throughout Berg’s life, the old man didn’t attend a single one of the baseball games Berg played in. Bernard Berg was disdainful of sports and pressured his son to leave baseball to become a lawyer.
19-year baseball career
Berg’s standout performance at Princeton gained him a berth with the Brooklyn Dodgers, then known as the Robins. During the nineteen seasons that ensued, he played for a succession of professional teams, most of the time as a catcher. Although he demonstrated early flashes of stardom, those episodes were brief and rare. Most of the time he was a benchwarmer who rarely ventured onto the field.
“The brainiest man in baseball”
Moe Berg was “The brainiest man in baseball.” As his obituary in the New York Times noted, “‘He can speak 10 languages,’ his friends used to joke, ‘but he can’t hit in any of them.'” However, managers kept him on the roster because he boosted team morale as a friend and sometime mentor to other players, enthralling them with stories about his adventures in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. And it surely didn’t hurt that he was a magnet for sportswriters, too. “Every day Berg sat in the dugout before the game and told stories to crowds of reporters.” The press couldn’t get enough of “Professor Berg.” In fact, as this perceptive biography of Moe Berg makes clear, it was the press, and especially the New York Times sports columnist John Kieran, who “created the public Berg.”
“A life of abiding strangeness”
“There were crumbs of truth in every story,” Dawidoff notes, “yet the jolly world of Professor Berg was false at the center. This was not the man, it was caricature on a grand scale. Which didn’t bother Berg. In fact, he encouraged the burlesque and guided the creation of this shimmering distortion.” The reality was starkly different. “Berg’s was a life of abiding strangeness. The secret world of Moe Berg was charming and seamy, vivid and unsettling, wonderful and sad.”
Familiarity with at least 16 languages
Berg’s command of languages was endlessly fascinating to those around him, but exaggerations abounded. Press reports variously credited him with speaking—fluently, of course—anywhere from ten to twenty-seven languages. In fact, when he applied to the OSS much later, “Berg lists his French, Spanish, and Portuguese as ‘fair,’ and his Italian, German, and Japanese as ‘slight.'” However, Dawidoff reports that “during his life he also took a passing interest in, among other languages, Russian, Polish, Mandarin, Chinese, Arabic, Old High German, and Bulgarian.” And at various points throughout this book, Dawidoff also has Berg speaking Greek and Latin and reading Sanskrit (which was not a spoken language).
War work for the OSS
Moe Berg’s fame as a spy rests on a single encounter with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who headed Nazi Germany’s quest for an atomic bomb. The OSS had dispatched him to Switzerland in December 1944. There, he was to attend a lecture by Werner Heisenberg and attempt to ascertain whether the Nazis were on the verge of building a bomb—or even had one already. He had been tutored in nuclear physics and devoured books on the subject in preparation—to such an extent that some physicists expressed amazement with his understanding. If Berg determined the Germans were on track to a bomb, he was to stand up in the lecture hall, pull out a revolver he’d been issued, and shoot Heisenberg.
His most famous exploit was a bust
Fortunately, there was not even a hint in the physicist’s lecture that he was even engaged in nuclear research, and Berg left the man in peace. Ironically, Heisenberg was indeed conducting research in nuclear physics. But he was struggling against scientific roadblocks and interference by Nazi functionaries. And the Allies had already received through other means abundant evidence that the Nazi atomic bomb program was floundering, years behind the Manhattan Project. But of course Berg didn’t know any of this, and nor did his handlers in the OSS.
Befriending prominent German, Swiss, and French scientists
Some of Berg’s other work for the OSS was of greater consequence for the war effort and the Allies’ postwar scientific research efforts. Berg was detailed to the Allies’ Alsos Mission, which had been organized primarily to dig up information about the Nazi bomb project but secondarily to connect with Axis scientists, learn whether they were developing biological or chemical weapons, secure Nazi supplies of uranium and heavy water, and begin the process of enticing the best scientists to move to Britain or the United States. Berg clashed with Colonel Boris Pash, the commander of the Alsos Mission, and operated independently as a consequence. But it was his efforts befriending prominent German, Swiss, and French scientists that helped lure them westward as the war wound down. Pash and his team were less successful.
Life after World War II
Berg lived for twenty-five years after he left the OSS in 1947. Although he doggedly hid the information from everyone outside his family, he lived with his brother “Dr. Sam” from 1947 to 1964 and then, after Dr. Sam kicked him out, with his spinster sister Ethel until his death in 1972. In succession, his two siblings housed, fed, and dressed him and gave him money for his nearly incessant travel and incidentals. But neither of them could figure him out. At one point during the war, “Berg [had] brought Chico Marx along for dinner [with his brother] one evening. Sam hadn’t known that his brother socialized with the Marx brothers, but Berg wasn’t explaining that, either.” In fact, Berg was a celebrity of sorts and connected with a great many luminaries of the era. He even spent a couple of lively afternoons on a visit to Princeton talking about baseball and relativity with Albert Einstein. It seems he could speak about nearly any subject at length and in detail—and in several languages.
Berg was not among the one out of ten OSS employees asked to join the new CIA in 1947. Under wartime conditions and Bill Donovan‘s undisciplined management, the OSS had been a freewheeling operation that tolerated Berg’s eccentricities and his occasional disappearances. The CIA would not. Apart from a few brief stretches when the agency later hired him on a contract basis, and for other short periods when friends employed him as a way to support him, he never worked for the rest of his life.
What might a psychiatrist say about this man’s life?
At some ill-defined point, eccentricity crosses the line into mental illness. I’m no psychiatrist—my brother is the shrink in the family—but it seems clear to me that Moe Berg was ill for a great many years. Dawidoff doesn’t indulge the temptation to engage in psychological speculation. Like other writers, he repeatedly refers to Berg as eccentric. But surely the man’s surpassingly strange behavior over a quarter-century following the war would merit a psychiatric evaluation. You might well imagine that a biography of Moe Berg would include such speculation.
About the author
The Catcher Was a Spy was the first of Nicholas Dawidoff‘s six nonfiction books to date, one of four about professional American sports. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard and a former Guggenheim Fellow.
June 21, 2018
Very interesting book. Not bad but not great either. It was just okay.
December 5, 2021
The story of a baseball player turned spy sounds intriguing, but knowing many of the details left me underwhelmed.
Moe Berg was a flaneur, a polymath and autodidact, a bit of a con man, a very private person who was also exceedingly charming when he tried.
This was a man who worked just enough to get by, but never really excelled at anything. His greatest love appeared to be reading the newspapers and wandering through life unencumbered by family or friends (except when he called on them for a meal or lodging).
He was able to hang around in baseball for a long time because he was so personable, and it allowed him plenty of free time to do as he liked. The spy business in World War II was similar; the freewheeling nature of the OSS allowed Berg to saunter around Europe, finding out some things for the agency and living high off their expenses without worrying about financial accounting. It is intimated that Berg delivered some significant intelligence (he did get the Medal of Freedom), but what is described in the book isn't very impressive. While it has been suggested that Berg determined that the German atomic bomb program was a dud, he didn't really do that, as others had figured it out by the time they sent Berg to meet Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland in 1944. Berg had an opportunity to kill Heisenberg, but didn't since he didn't think Heisenberg could deliver a bomb. Anyhow, Berg wasn't really a killer and was uncomfortable with a gun.
As Berg's life was an odd mashup, so was this book. The first half is about baseball, the middle part about WWII espionage, and the last part about Berg's peripatetic life after the war. Baseball fans will like the first half, espionage fans will like the middle, but nobody will much care how Berg knocked around the country after the war.
This was probably a brilliant guy whose personality and basic laziness got in the way of his achieving anything significant. It's a tantalizing “what might have been” story, but ultimately doesn't carry the weight to justify a 350-page book.
Moe Berg was a flaneur, a polymath and autodidact, a bit of a con man, a very private person who was also exceedingly charming when he tried.
This was a man who worked just enough to get by, but never really excelled at anything. His greatest love appeared to be reading the newspapers and wandering through life unencumbered by family or friends (except when he called on them for a meal or lodging).
He was able to hang around in baseball for a long time because he was so personable, and it allowed him plenty of free time to do as he liked. The spy business in World War II was similar; the freewheeling nature of the OSS allowed Berg to saunter around Europe, finding out some things for the agency and living high off their expenses without worrying about financial accounting. It is intimated that Berg delivered some significant intelligence (he did get the Medal of Freedom), but what is described in the book isn't very impressive. While it has been suggested that Berg determined that the German atomic bomb program was a dud, he didn't really do that, as others had figured it out by the time they sent Berg to meet Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland in 1944. Berg had an opportunity to kill Heisenberg, but didn't since he didn't think Heisenberg could deliver a bomb. Anyhow, Berg wasn't really a killer and was uncomfortable with a gun.
As Berg's life was an odd mashup, so was this book. The first half is about baseball, the middle part about WWII espionage, and the last part about Berg's peripatetic life after the war. Baseball fans will like the first half, espionage fans will like the middle, but nobody will much care how Berg knocked around the country after the war.
This was probably a brilliant guy whose personality and basic laziness got in the way of his achieving anything significant. It's a tantalizing “what might have been” story, but ultimately doesn't carry the weight to justify a 350-page book.
July 18, 2013
I love baseball. I love baseball books, movies and history. Moe Berg was a baseball player and a spy. He was also a weird off the wall character with high intelligence. He was a college graduate and a law school graduate during a time when most professional baseball players were the exact opposite. He was a unique real life character. So how could a book about him be boring. I would not have finished it except I wanted to know more about Berg. The author seemed to get bogged down in minutia. I gave it two stars for Moe Berg. The book did not deserve even that many stars. I was disappointed in the telling of Berg's story. It should have been an interesting entertaining book. It was not.
September 23, 2011
Great book uncovering the truly mysterious life of Moe Berg. Follows Berg through his beginnings to retirement from baseball, examining his potential role in the OSS. Was he working for the US government, or was he just a whacky ballplayer that participated in some strange things while playing ball. You decide.
August 6, 2011
After reading, it's hard to tell what kind of person Moe Berg was, which is probably the way he would have wanted you to think.
August 1, 2023
Unfortunately, this potentially fascinating story got bogged down by repetition and minutiae
December 5, 2019
This is an exhaustive and at times exhausting read about one of the most mysterious characters of baseball history. The author interviewed literally several hundred people aside from the many articles and books about Moe Berg. Unfortunately there are hundreds of names mentioned in the book so the reader is at a loss to keep them in context. The early baseball years were for me the most interesting and easy to follow. The OSS or "spying years" were too detailed and full of unnecessary and repetitive information. In fact the personality traits of Berg and his idiosyncrasies are told and retold so many times that the book becomes tedious to read. I credit the author for his diligent work and for framing this mysterious man into a psychologically cogent personality type that renders Moe Berg more comprehensible. Perhaps the best chapter in the book is the last chapter which traces the origins of Berg's insecurities from his father's lack of empathy and support to his Jewish roots: both of which made Berg obsessively insecure and in constant need for recognition. Frankly, as a Jew who had always felt pride in the baseball/spy character of Moe Berg, I have to say that this book has shattered my opinion. He was in many ways a charlatan, a self centered man who could never maintain an intimate relationship, a vagabond, an unabashed freeloader, and a man incapable of giving back. He was a man bestowed with a great intellect(not as great as he led others to believe), a man who could have had a successful baseball career but who feared competition and therefore contented himself as a third string catcher, a man with a law degree that he obtained while playing baseball but who practiced for only a few months, and a man who lived his last twenty five years of life literally doing nothing but reading papers and living off the generosity of others. This book saddened me. Somehow the author concludes that Berg lived a life of independence and lived the way he wanted. Somehow I doubt that very much. My rating is 3.5 stars.
September 2, 2020
Initially interesting but became repetitive quickly. Eventually read like the author was on a deadline and hadn't had time to organize his notes.
May 8, 2023
Moe Berg’s life is certainly a fascinating one, but I felt as though the book slowed down after his spying across the seas was over. However, that’s at no fault of the author. I think it was definitely still a good read, just a little long winded at times.
April 29, 2023
A redundant but less-than-incisive look at Moe Berg. Dawidoff seems to have done a lot of work to uncover the workings of Moe Berg but unfortunately ran into the same issues with the subject as his contemporaries. To whit, Berg was someone who relished being relished but the substance behind his ego was not well-elucidated with in life or (with this book) posthumously.
This book is full of dozens of, functionally, the same anecdote in the unknowableness of the subject. That repetitiveness, coupled with the faux intrigue of Berg's being a spy (it is in the title so speculation by contemporaries is less than interesting) left me very disappointed with this work.
This book is full of dozens of, functionally, the same anecdote in the unknowableness of the subject. That repetitiveness, coupled with the faux intrigue of Berg's being a spy (it is in the title so speculation by contemporaries is less than interesting) left me very disappointed with this work.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 16, 2015
Moe Berg may qualify as the most intriguing baseball player of all time. A weak-hitting but quality defensive catcher who kicked around with various teams for over a decade, the enigmatic Berg would make his mark on another front when he served as a spy for the OSS during WW II and for the CIA in the post-war. Unlike most ballplayers of the 20s-40s (or perhaps any era), he was a Princeton grad, had a law degree from Columbia, and was multi-lingual. He was also Jewish which made him somewhat of a rarity both in the baseball ranks and at exclusive clubby Princeton at the time.
A truly cosmopolitan figure, he was part of the famous 1930s baseball tour of Japan on a team which included the likes of Ruth and Gehrig. He was often popping up in forbidden places taking photos which he would later claim were used in American bombing missions. During the war, he roamed North Africa and Europe and was one of the agents responsible for locating German scientists involved in nuclear physics. Because he was conversant with science and had his language facility, he was regarded as a prized asset by the American intelligence community. Unfortunately, he had difficulty explaining his rather exorbitant expense accounts and in a pattern he would continue in the ensuing decades, he would often vanish and resurface with no accounting for his activities. These were indiscretions which would later irritate his overseers at the CIA who eventually would terminate his connection with the agency.
His mysterious lifestyle would be the focus of the author's narrative, sometimes to the point of tedium. The peripatetic Berg never held a regular full-time job after the war and basically existed on the largesse of sympathetic relatives and friends. His eccentricities and obsessions (always carrying a stack of newspapers and wearing the same style suits) and lack of romantic attachments made him even more compelling to a cast of admirers. Many of whom, as indicated, graciously subsidized his appetites and housing needs. It is with those encounters that an otherwise well-written book does flag a little as there are so many such episodes that a few examples would have been sufficient rather than a whole litany of such interactions. They almost all came to the same end, Berg would - for lack of a better word - mooch, then take offense over some trivial insult - real or imagined, and move on to the next benefactor.
This biography was written in the 1990s and overall is an enjoyable detour from the usual sports biography with a minor reduction in the rating for the reason cited.
A truly cosmopolitan figure, he was part of the famous 1930s baseball tour of Japan on a team which included the likes of Ruth and Gehrig. He was often popping up in forbidden places taking photos which he would later claim were used in American bombing missions. During the war, he roamed North Africa and Europe and was one of the agents responsible for locating German scientists involved in nuclear physics. Because he was conversant with science and had his language facility, he was regarded as a prized asset by the American intelligence community. Unfortunately, he had difficulty explaining his rather exorbitant expense accounts and in a pattern he would continue in the ensuing decades, he would often vanish and resurface with no accounting for his activities. These were indiscretions which would later irritate his overseers at the CIA who eventually would terminate his connection with the agency.
His mysterious lifestyle would be the focus of the author's narrative, sometimes to the point of tedium. The peripatetic Berg never held a regular full-time job after the war and basically existed on the largesse of sympathetic relatives and friends. His eccentricities and obsessions (always carrying a stack of newspapers and wearing the same style suits) and lack of romantic attachments made him even more compelling to a cast of admirers. Many of whom, as indicated, graciously subsidized his appetites and housing needs. It is with those encounters that an otherwise well-written book does flag a little as there are so many such episodes that a few examples would have been sufficient rather than a whole litany of such interactions. They almost all came to the same end, Berg would - for lack of a better word - mooch, then take offense over some trivial insult - real or imagined, and move on to the next benefactor.
This biography was written in the 1990s and overall is an enjoyable detour from the usual sports biography with a minor reduction in the rating for the reason cited.
September 17, 2018
An interesting character. I first heard about Moe Berg in another baseball book and had been intrigued by the legend. The legend seems to be exaggerated (when aren't they), when it probably didn't need to be. I got the distinct impression that Berg was A) a wonderfully talented man that B) didn't want to be too closely inspected by those around him. So he C) wore a caricature of himself that exaggerated his accomplishments when D) no embellishment was needed. It was almost like he was afraid he wouldn't measure up. Possibly he thought he didn't measure up, and was embarrassed by it. Keeping his distance, running in/out of people's lives, was a way to keep busy, and keep other people interested in himself.
As a baseball player he likely could have had a decent, though considerably shorter, career in the major leagues based just off his natural skills and work ethic. Becoming an "odd character" he was able to keep playing by getting people to focus on other things than what he was actually capable of on the field day to day.
His spy work was impressive, though not the stuff of James Bond. And I have to wonder if he didn't get caught up in the romanticized media portrayal of spies only to find his own situation falling short of such heroic exploits. By doing things his way and not letting other people measure him compared to those around him he created a bit of mystique, but also created a rift between those he needed to curry favor with in order to continue on.
In his private life he came across as quite confused. At times he acted like a sexual predator. He didn't appear to be voluntarily celibate, but he didn't seem to fully understand the norms and customs of courtship. Apparently neither did his siblings. I wonder just how much of his behavior was of a man dealing with a genetic mental disorder.
In all, a very interesting read though some of the chapters were broken up unusually.
The eBook was formatted well with no obvious spelling/grammatical errors.
As a baseball player he likely could have had a decent, though considerably shorter, career in the major leagues based just off his natural skills and work ethic. Becoming an "odd character" he was able to keep playing by getting people to focus on other things than what he was actually capable of on the field day to day.
His spy work was impressive, though not the stuff of James Bond. And I have to wonder if he didn't get caught up in the romanticized media portrayal of spies only to find his own situation falling short of such heroic exploits. By doing things his way and not letting other people measure him compared to those around him he created a bit of mystique, but also created a rift between those he needed to curry favor with in order to continue on.
In his private life he came across as quite confused. At times he acted like a sexual predator. He didn't appear to be voluntarily celibate, but he didn't seem to fully understand the norms and customs of courtship. Apparently neither did his siblings. I wonder just how much of his behavior was of a man dealing with a genetic mental disorder.
In all, a very interesting read though some of the chapters were broken up unusually.
The eBook was formatted well with no obvious spelling/grammatical errors.
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