Charlie Hustle Charlie Hustle

Charlie Hustle

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

    • 4.6 • 57 Ratings
    • $14.99

Publisher Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A captivating chronicle of the incredible story of one of America’s most iconic, charismatic, and still polarizing figures—baseball immortal Pete Rose—and an exquisite cultural history of baseball and America in the second half of the twentieth century • "Comprehensive, compulsively readable and wholly terrific."—The Wall Street Journal

"Long before the inquiry into Ohtani's ties to betting, there was Pete Rose....Charlie Hustle chronicles one of the most polarizing figures in sports."—NPR, All Things Considered

“Baseball biography at its best. With Charlie Hustle, Pete Rose finally gets the book he deserves, and baseball fans get the book we’ve been craving, a hard-hitting, beautifully-written tale that will stand for years to come as the definitive account of one of the most fascinating figures in American sports history.”—Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of King: A Life


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.

GENRE
Biographies & Memoirs
RELEASED
2024
March 26
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
464
Pages
PUBLISHER
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
46.5
MB

Customer Reviews

Dan Joe Jr. ,

Captivating

The best kind of biography - a story that's fast paced, seamlessly flowing from one interesting incident/detail/anecdote to the next - and happens to be true. (It might be difficult to invent a more classically tragic figure than Rose.) The WSJ review had it spot on commenting that the end reads like a thriller. But if you've ever asked yourself how MLB players came to earn such an enormous salary, this book maps that out, too. Another welcome bonus is the level of detail on American culture in that era.

Bibi Cakes1 ,

Pete Rose

Lots of interesting information

Jgolch ,

Must read for any sports fan

I thought I knew the Pete rose story, but reading Charlie Hustle made me realize how much I never knew. And how much I’d forgotten. There was a reason we loved watching Pete play, and those memories came vividly back to life in this book. And the same with Pete’s epic fall and the characters in it - Dowd, Giamatti, Giosia, Jantzen, Francis, Vincent. This book doesn’t just retell a story, it puts you in the middle and makes you relive it. The perfect gift for a college grad bombarded with gambling ads or for your dad who remembers watching Pete play. Highly recommend.

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