THE BOOK IS TERRIFIC:

When we first meet Moe Berg in 1938, he's already an outcast on his current team, the Boston Red Sox. He's old, he isn't the best player, but he's all-seeing from his position calling the pitches as a catcher, and cocky when his instincts are proven correct.

He speaks a slew of languages, reads foreign newspapers, appears on radio quiz shows (and blows everyone away) but reveals nothing about himself. He doesn't socialize with the rest of the team, and some think he may be a "left-handed batter," code for a homosexual.

Later, we'll see that even in this bigoted era, Berg prefers absolute privacy than defending himself against this charge. (As it happens, he lives with a woman without being married, an ignoble thing for this time period, but certainly "preferable" to the other claim.) There are implications that Berg's self-perception as an outsider springs from his earliest days on a baseball team, the only Jew on a church-organized squad.

Berg joins baseball's most notable figures, like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, on a goodwill tour of Japan. His stats didn't really merit it, but the Princeton graduate who later attended Columbia Law School and the Sorbonne had a reputation among sportswriters as being "the Professor."

Japanese was one of the few languages his didn't speak, but the wags thought he did, so he ended up on the trip. He brought a small movie camera with him and, seizing an opportunity, he shot footage of an air field from the roof of a hospital. He had a hunch this could come in handy down the line. 

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