What I got from the entire book of over 400 pp was that Moe Berg loved baseball and became a major league catcher but very poor hitter. He was also a gifted intellectual who gained a law degree and spoke many languages. He joined the OSS and eventually met Heisenberg, the German scientist rumored to be working on the atom bomb. Berg did not kill him though he’d been directed to do so. Good thing because the Nazis were not close to creating the bomb.
There were zillions of mentions of people and zillions of situations in this book where Moe had a part, but they didn’t stick in my mind because they didn’t recur. Moe just moved thru his life without any long relationships or jobs. I skipped lots of the last half of the book because there was no story. ( )

I was quite disappointed in this. From early on, I could see that Moe Berg was going to be more of an anti-hero than a hero, but the quirky character in the beginning turned into a pathetic loser by the end. I could have done with a lot less of his afterwar activities because, honestly, it was mostly the same stuff over and over in a downward spiral. Plus I found it annoying that his siblings weren't really discussed much until the end of the book. I'm OK with a narrative that isn't completely linear, but it really hurt the flow of the book by introducing it so late. Through the end of the war, I found the book to be dry but interesting. After that, it was dry, sad and disjointed. ( )

The “Moeslem Religion”! That made me smile!

“I don’t care how many of them damn degrees you got, they ain’t never learned you to hit the curve.”

Moe Berg is one impressive dude! An MLB catcher, a speaker of many languages, and a spy. Secretive, semi-anti-social, and smart as a whip! It's hard to believe that one person could do all of this! His story is super interesting! The book was too, but started to fade (for me) about half way. Still, it has baseball and espionage, so I'm glad that I read it! ( )

Over-written and over-long (by more than 300 pages!!!), the story of Moe Berg might have made a good Sports Illustrated article. Stretched to nearly 400 pages, this book has little to recommend it. I certainly can't. ( )

This is a fine biography of one of the most unusual men to ever play professional sports. He didn't turn out to be much of a baseball player, possibly due to a knee injury suffered early in his career, but he stuck around for a long time as a backup catcher. But it was his non-baseball career that was truly mysterious.

An interesting man's interesting story, but the sections about Berg's later years seemed a bit repetitive and overloaded with detail. ( )

A baseball player who didn't want to play. An intelligence officer working for the government, who became even more important in his own mind. And a man who never quite fit in with close friends (or wanted to), preferring a limited relationship he could control. This is Moe Berg.
A precocious childe gifted by innate intellectual ability , Moe demanded to start school at 3 and 1/2 years old, and went and worked diligently to build a reputation as a scholar. Berg, born into a Jewish family, was more concerned about assimilating with his peer group and being accepted as a model American boy.
On to Princeton, again excelling at his studies and becoming the best player on the university's baseball team. He became a member of the Brooklyn Robins upon graduation, getting $5000 bonus for signing. He spent the off season studying in France, Switzerland and Italy. And in March 1926, he decided to forgo spring training along with the first two months of the season to complete his first year of law school. Today that might raise few eyebrows but was unheard of back then.
He came back to baseball which for almost 20 years paid him well enough and allowed him plentiful time to explore his many other interests, including serving his country as a spy during WWII focusing on the Axis' development of atomic weapons.
If this story hasn't peeked your interest about Moe Berg, I'll be very surprised. Follow him through his life recreated from notebooks and letters that Moe himself kept. This is one of the most unusual life stories you'll ever read. Nicholas Dawidoff, the author probes deeply into the man and the myth. I found myself drawn to each successive chapter as fascinatedly peeled away layer after layer about this most unusual man.
Not perfect by a long shot, hard to befriend and develop any but the most superficial personal connections, Berg nonetheless lives a life that if not for the evidence seemed too fantastic to be true. A one of a kind biography! ( )

A really engaging look at a little-known individual from US history. I love all things esoteric, so I picked this up at the beginning of the summer and spent a month reading it between novels. Well-researched and interesting, if not as inspiring as one would hope (for all of his talk, Berg didn't really accomplish much in the end).

I would definitely recommend this to any fan of baseball, the history of US intelligence agencies, or merely eccentric individuals. This history delivers on all counts. ( )

Berg's life is at once fascinating and depressing. Berg was, evidently, tremendously intelligent but a little bit broken inside and Dawidoff has his hands full stitching it all together. I felt like at times he had too much redundant source material, and too little framework to hang it on. The resulting book is a bit like an undersized Xmas tree loaded up with scores of tacky ornaments, but with a few well-crafted beauties tucked in here an there, sometimes hidden by the cheap plastic baubles cluttering up the branches. That's my long-winded way of saying this book, for all it's meticulous research, needed an editor with with less patience for repetition and tangents.

RIYL: A Beautiful Mind, Fear Strikes Out. ( )

Interesting as the title sounds. Dawidoff has done his research. ( )