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

davidoff writes beautifully and he has my attention from the beginning to the end of his book. i didn't know who moe berg was before purchasing the book and wish i had known moe in person, even though i know he was annoying. am glad to have siri near me, while i'm reading....at least once a page, there's a word i don't know.after reading this, i feel i know the real moe berg....but doesn't everybody?

As a historian of science, I was drawn to this book because of a very interesting connection between the physicist Werner Heisenberg and Moe Berg, a major league baseball player. Casey Stengel called Moe Berg "the strangest man ever to play baseball," and Casey was pretty strange himself. Moe Berg was a catcher for the Brooklyn Robins (which later became the Dodgers), the Chicago White Sox, and the Boston Red Sox, among other teams. But during World War II he became a high-level spy for the United States. The story goes that Berg was sent to Switzerland to make contact with Heisenberg and then to kill him! (The United States believed Heisenberg was the key to Hitler developing an atomic bomb.) Moe Berg attended an event at which Heisenberg appeared and afterward walked through quiet streets with him. Berg had a gun in his pocket that he intended to use to shoot Heisenberg. However, after talking to Heisenberg at length, he concluded that the Germans had no intention of trying to create an atomic bomb, so he decided not to kill him after all. If you want to learn more about this unique fellow, read this book.

Such a great story…also the movie is fantastic as well!

The physical book itself was in good shape, arrived in reasonable time, and okay priced. The book content is different- so that's more on the subject & Author. Mo was a strange guy who got a thrill out of being such. It takes a lot of reading to actually get to the spy part but it is interesting. I just don't think MO would've wanted a book about him so he was obscure and mysterious on purpose, so that shows through a bit.

Great story.

I thought I read this book many years ago but I think it was a different one, since this book is so detailed about everything regarding Moe's life. unfortunately the last 20 plus years of his life were quite sad, and almost depressing to read about. he was a very talented, perhaps borderline genius in some ways, who served his country in ways that not many could accomplish before and during the war, regardless of whether the importance of some of his work might be debated. I encourage anyone to read it if you have an interest in baseball, the second world war or that period of history.

What a great story about thing we don't know what happen during WW II.

I found this book to be very difficult to read.The author spends far too much time on developing Moe Berg’s background and uses language in many instances to demonstrate the author’s extensive vocabulary, rather than giving the reader a free flowing, easy to read story. I do not recommend buying this tedious, very long, complicated book.

Extraordinarily well written account of a fascinating individual and his multi-faceted life. So much more within these pages than was shown in the film of the same name.

Livre

Enjoyable book about a little known part of history -- both for baseball and for international espionage.

Un libro veramente molto bello e ben strutturato; racconta la storia di Moe Berg, un ex-agente della C.I.A. nonchè ex-giocatore dei Boston Red Sox, dagli albori fino al suo arruolamento nell'agenzia passando attraverso il periodo trascorso nella MLB...Consigliatissimo agli appasionati del genere.

Biografia di uno strano personaggio, diventato un mito fin da giovane. Giocatore di baseball famoso, ma mai eccezionale, poi collaboratore dello OSS americano durante la guerra, infine perenne disoccupato che visse (quasi sempre) in modo agiato grazie alle sue relazioni con importanti personaggi. La biografia è molto particolareggiata e documentata, anche se a volte prolissa, soprattutto nei primi capitoli, interamente dedicati al modo del baseball, difficile da capire per noi italiani.