Books with author Nicholas Dawidoff

The only Major League ballplayer whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA, Moe Berg has the singular distinction of having both a 15-year career as a catcher for such teams as the New York Robins and the Chicago White Sox and that of a spy for the OSS during World War II. Here, Dawidoff provides "a careful and sympathetic biography" (Chicago Sun-Times) of this enigmatic man.

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.