Word: dawidoff
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What the spirited and diligent writer Nicholas Dawidoff does document, with fresh research, some 200 interviews and unqualified affection, is that the oddball legend of Moe Berg is based mainly on his refusal to take full cuts at his many opportunities. He was a Princeton honors graduate who would have had a longer and more successful career in the classroom than on the diamond; a lawyer trained at Columbia who never established a practice; a linguist with a reluctance to converse in any of the dozen languages he had studied; and a darkly handsome ladies' man who was nevertheless something...
...slow day sportswriters could depend on the polymath Berg to fill a column. "More profiles of Berg were published than any other journeyman ballplayer in history," writes Dawidoff. But he will be best remembered as the spy who took rain checks. An OSS operative during World War II, Berg traveled widely, lived well and managed to be where trouble wasn't. In 1944 he was at a conference in peaceful Switzerland to hear a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel prizewinning physicist who headed Hitler's atom-bomb project. Berg's orders were to shoot the scientist if it became...
Nearly all Dawidoff's sources agree that Berg was good company and an intriguing storyteller. He had been tangential to big events. He could talk politics, philosophy and sports. Babe Ruth was a pal, as were Nelson Rockefeller and Chico Marx. Eventually the reader comes to see Berg as a one- man March of Time...
...blending himself into history and folklore may have been a strategy to deflect intimacy and embarrassing inquiry. Dawidoff suggests this view, with speculation that Berg had trouble living up to his billing as athlete-scholar- spy and actually felt unworthy. Just as likely, he feared the dull prospect of settling down after baseball and a good war and so decided to schedule the rest of his life as a series of away games...
...Dawidoff and Benjamin Miller were among 135 finalists from 60 colleges and universities across the country considered for fellowships, Gill said. Candidates must have had little exposure to Asia...