Charlie Hustle
The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball
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4.7 • 21 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sports biographies don't get much better than this enthralling and tragic account of the career of Pete Rose, Major League Baseball's all-time hits leader. Sportswriter O'Brien (Paradise Falls) describes how Rose was pressed from an early age by his father (whose own dreams of a pro baseball career were never realized) to excel at sports. Despite being small for his age, Rose had an exceptional drive and passion that helped him excel on the citywide team he played with in his teens. After a few years in the minor leagues, Rose earned a spot on the Cincinnati Reds in 1963 and was named the National League's Rookie of the Year. The portrait that emerges is empathetic yet balanced, with breathless recaps of Rose's first championship season in 1975 and 44-game hitting streak in 1978 tempered by troubling discussions of his yearslong affair with an underage high schooler when he was in his 30s and the gambling addiction that left him barred from induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame (in 2004, Rose confirmed allegations that he bet on the Reds while playing for and managing the team in the 1980s). O'Brien movingly depicts Rose as an everyman who willed his own greatness only to succumb to his baser impulses, and the rich research draws on extensive interviews with players, federal investigators, and Rose himself. Definitive and elegantly told, this is a home run.
Customer Reviews
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.
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.