Books with author Nicholas Dawidoff

NATIONAL BESTSELLERNow 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 ReviewMoe Berg is the only major-league baseball player whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA. For Berg was much more than a third-string catcher who played on several major league teams between 1923 and 1939. Educated at Princeton and the Sorbonne, he as reputed to speak a dozen languages (although it was also said he couldn't hit in any of them) and went on to become an OSS spy in Europe during World War II. As Nicholas Dawidoff follows Berg from his claustrophobic childhood through his glamorous (though equivocal) careers in sports and espionage and into the long, nomadic years during which he lived on the hospitality of such scattered acquaintances as Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein, he succeeds not only in establishing where Berg went, but who he was beneath his layers of carefully constructed cover. As engrossing as a novel by John le Carré, The Catcher Was a Spy is a triumphant work of historical and psychological detection.

NATIONAL BESTSELLERNow 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 ReviewMoe Berg is the only major-league baseball player whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA. For Berg was much more than a third-string catcher who played on several major league teams between 1923 and 1939. Educated at Princeton and the Sorbonne, he as reputed to speak a dozen languages (although it was also said he couldn't hit in any of them) and went on to become an OSS spy in Europe during World War II. As Nicholas Dawidoff follows Berg from his claustrophobic childhood through his glamorous (though equivocal) careers in sports and espionage and into the long, nomadic years during which he lived on the hospitality of such scattered acquaintances as Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein, he succeeds not only in establishing where Berg went, but who he was beneath his layers of carefully constructed cover. As engrossing as a novel by John le Carré, The Catcher Was a Spy is a triumphant work of historical and psychological detection.

In a series of indelible portraits of country music stars, Dawidoff reveals, among others, Jimmie Rodgers, the “father of Country”; Johnny Cash, the “Man in Black”; and Patsy Cline, a lonely figure striding out bravely in a man’s world. In the Country of Country is a passionate and expansive account of a quintessentially American art form and the performers that made country music what it is today. Both deeply personal and endlessly evocative, In the Country of Country pays tribute to the music that sprang from places like Maces Springs, Virginia, home of the Carter Family, and Bakersfield, California, where Buck Owens held sway. Bestselling author Nicholas Dawidoff takes readers to the back roads and country hollows that were home to Chet Atkins, Doc Watson, Emmylou Harris, and many more.

The stories about Moe Berg - his behavior, his intelligence, his charm - are legion, as are the unanswered questions posed by his life. A baseball player and a spy, he was one of the most colorful men to pursue either line of work. He played in the major leagues from 1923 through 1939 and then became a coach for the Boston Red Sox. It was not, however, as a player that Berg earned his highest accolades, but as a dugout savant (it was said that Berg, educated at Princeton, the Sorbonne, and Columbia, could speak a dozen languages but couldn't hit in any of them).A month after Pearl Harbor, the day after his father - who had never approved of Berg's choice of career - died, Berg announced his departure from baseball and entered the world of diplomacy and espionage. But only now has the extent of his work for the OSS in determining Germany's atomic bomb capability been revealed. The Catcher Was a Spy provides one of the few thoroughly documented accounts of a real spy's life.Equally compelling is Nicholas Dawidoff's account of Berg after the war. A secretive man who had a reputation for appearing and disappearing without warning, Berg has long been the subject of wonder and speculation. Behind the enigma of Moe Berg was a life of fantastic and fascinating complexity - a life that has never been pieced together so seamlessly and to such riveting effect as it is now in what David Remnick calls "a stunning biography."

In The Fly Swatter, Nicholas Dawidoff--bestselling author of The Catcher Was a Spy--vividly reconstructs the life of his grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron-the Harvard professor who knew the most.A fascinating character, Gerschenkron feuded with Vladimir Nabokov and John Kenneth Galbraith, flirted with Marlene Dietrich, and played chess with Marcel Duchamp and one-upped both Isiah Berlin and (allegedly) Ted Williams. At Harvard, this celebrated polyglot was known as “The Great Gerschenkron.” He was an influential economic theorist who knew twenty languages and so much about so many other things that he was offered chairs in three departments. All this after beginning life with traumatic dramatic escapes from the Bolsheviks (in 1920) and the Nazis (in 1938). Riveting and eloquent, The Fly Swatter's most unusual accomplishment is that it succeeds in telling the extraordinary story of a man's soul.

The most interesting lives are not always the best-known lives, and this is the account of a truly fascinating person. The stories of Alexander Gerschenkron—his great escapes, his vivid wit, his feuds, his flirtations, and his supremely cultured mind—are the stuff of legend. Born in 1904 into the progressive Odessa intelligentsia, Gerschenkron fled the Russian Revolution at sixteen and settled in Vienna, immersing himself in the charged civic and intellectual life of another doomed city. Escaping the Nazis in the late 1930s, he made his way to Massachusetts, evolving from a political exile and social outcast into a man referred to by The New York Times as “Harvard’s scholarly model,” and by his peers as “The Great Gerschenkron”—the Harvard professor who knew the most. Gerschenkron was a dazzling thinker, and his professional theories complemented his personal preoccupations. He was particularly interested in people—and economies—that cleverly overcame the large forces conspiring to hold them back; there were uses, he said, to adversity. Colleagues admired his vigorous ethical code and considered his personality to be perhaps even more original than his work. Gerschenkron was an uncompromising man who feuded with everyone from Vladimir Nabokov to John Kenneth Galbraith, who played chess with Marcel Duchamp, who enjoyed an intimate interlude with Marlene Dietrich, and who was a confidant of both Isaiah Berlin of Oxford and Ted Williams of the Red Sox. Or was he? Layers of mystery and contradiction are at the core of this brilliantly recreated life, this prism through which we look back across some of the most important and unsettling moments of the twentieth century. With The Fly Swatter, best-selling author Nicholas Dawidoff gives us an intelligent, beautifully written, deeply felt biographical memoir of a real-life American character.

Tracing some of the early influences of what is now considered country music, this book is a description of a cultural journey to the backroads, rural knolls and railway-crossing towns of Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia. The author sets out to show how the first practitioners' music, from the 1930s the 1960s, came to express the rural nostalgia and experience of dislocation that millions of Southern working-class Americans felt as they were forced by the Depression, the dust bowl, urban industrialization and the war, to find new jobs, new homes and new lives. The book includes portraits of leading country performers such as Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard and Chet Atkins.