A really engaging look at a little-known individual from US history. I love all things esoteric, so I picked this up at the beginning of the summer and spent a month reading it between novels. Well-researched and interesting, if not as inspiring as one would hope (for all of his talk, Berg didn't really accomplish much in the end).

I would definitely recommend this to any fan of baseball, the history of US intelligence agencies, or merely eccentric individuals. This history delivers on all counts. ( )

Berg's life is at once fascinating and depressing. Berg was, evidently, tremendously intelligent but a little bit broken inside and Dawidoff has his hands full stitching it all together. I felt like at times he had too much redundant source material, and too little framework to hang it on. The resulting book is a bit like an undersized Xmas tree loaded up with scores of tacky ornaments, but with a few well-crafted beauties tucked in here an there, sometimes hidden by the cheap plastic baubles cluttering up the branches. That's my long-winded way of saying this book, for all it's meticulous research, needed an editor with with less patience for repetition and tangents.

RIYL: A Beautiful Mind, Fear Strikes Out. ( )

Interesting as the title sounds. Dawidoff has done his research. ( )