Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball

By Keith O'Brien

Book Overview

Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago that still stands today. He was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn't.

In the 1980s, Pete Rose came to be at the center of one of the biggest scandals in baseball history. He kept secrets, ran with bookies, took on massive gambling debts, and he was magnificently, publicly cast out for betting on baseball and lying about it. The revelations that followed ruined him, changed life in Cincinnati, and forever altered the game.

Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America's most epic tragedies--the rise and fall of Pete Rose. Drawing on firsthand interviews with Rose himself and with his associates, as well as on investigators' reports, FBI and court records, archives, a mountain of press coverage, Keith O'Brien chronicles how Rose fell so far from being America's "great white hope." It is Pete Rose as we've never seen him before.

This is no ordinary sport biography, but cultural history at its finest. What O'Brien shows is that while Pete Rose didn't change, America and baseball did. This is the story of that change.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593469399
• ISBN13: 9780593469392
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

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I couldn't decide between this one or the one written by Pete himself in 2004. I opted for this one because it came out this year (2024) and it supposedly brought all the information that was out there together. This book has a definite modern/slant bias/correctness to it that I thought I could overlook. I got about 64 pages in and I can't do it. I wish I would have bought his. The order was right, no damage, and it got here very fast. So I can't return. I just ordered the wrong book. Wish I could give this to somebody. I guess I'll have to throw it in the trash.