Nicholas Dawidoff

A Journey to the Roots of American Music

In the Country of Country

The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

The Catcher Was a Spy

"Football is the country's most popular pastime, and yet most of what happens in today's NFL is a mystery. The New York Jets gave Nicholas Dawidoff a security code, a locker, [and] an office in the scouting department, and for an entire year he lived with the team. He has written a ... narrative about an emblematic NFL season that deepens the way we know the game"--

a year inside the turbulent world of NFL football

Collision low crossers

A landmark work of intimate reporting on race, class, and violence, told through a murder and the intersecting lives of three men in an iconic neighborhood.

The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

Featuring contributions by Robert Frost, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Amiri Baraka, and many others, an unrivaled collection pays tribute to America's favorite pasttime, featuring poems, stories, testimonies from classic oral histories, and many journalistic profiles that honor the game and its many celebrated players.

A Literary Anthology

Baseball

A reconstruction of Nicholas Dawidoff's grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron-the Harvard professor who knew the most.

Portrait of an Exceptional Character

The Fly Swatter

An unrivaled portrait of day-to-day life in the NFL: "Riveting . . . an instant classic" (New York Times Book Review). By spending a year with the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff entered a mysterious and private world with its own rituals and language. Equal parts Paper Lion, Moneyball, Friday Night Lights, and The Office, this absorbing, funny, and vivid narrative gets to the heart of a massive and stressful collective endeavor. Here is football in many faces: the polarizing, brilliant, and hilarious head coach; the general manager, whose job is to support (and suppress) the irrepressible coach; the defensive coaches and their in-house rivals, the offensive coaches; and of course the players. Wise safeties, brooding linebackers, high-strung cornerbacks, enthusiastic rookies, and a well-read nose tackle: they make up a strange and complex family. Dawidoff makes an emblematic NFL season come alive for fans and nonfans alike in a book about football that will forever change the way people watch and think about the sport.

A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football

Collision Low Crossers

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Now 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 Review Moe 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.

Nicholas Dawidoff

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