The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg by Nicholas Dawidoff is a 1994 biography about the real-life baseball player who was an American spy during WWII. Moe was an enigma while he lived, a graduate of Princeton who supposedly spoke a dozen languages, would wax lyrical about Sanskrit etymology in the dugout, and came and went from other peoples’ lives like a well-liked phantom. He would get angry if someone rearranged his carefully arrayed collection of daily newspapers because they were ‘alive’. He never married, hated having his Jewishness acknowledged, and spent the last twenty-five years of his life as a vagabond, largely unemployed, chasing the high of major league baseball and covert espionage that he never quite got back. He’s a tragic figure in many ways; he also, for all of the anecdotes that Dawidoff painstakingly collected about him – it seems everyone who ever met him had a story to tell – comes across as ultimately unknowable, though Dawidoff makes a valiant effort. His spy work is overblown in the popular imagination, but if you want to read about someone you can emphatically call ‘a character’, this is your book.