The Catcher Was a Spy

By Nicholas Dawidoff,

Book cover of The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Catcher Was a Spy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

As Dawidoff writes in this account of elusive Berg (1902-72), the major league catcher who also worked for the US as a spy, “[Hank] Greenberg punctured the stereotype that Jews were unathletic. Berg suggests that you could get a top education and be a ballplayer too.” A Princeton graduate who could speak twelve languages (but couldn’t hit in any of them), the OSS sent him to Germany during World War II to determine the state of Germany’s atomic bomb capacity. Rebuffed by the CIA after the war, the secretive, impoverished, self-consciously Jewish Berg became a world-wandering Jew. One of his…

From R.D.'s list on Jews and sports.

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