Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O'Brien
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A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From New York Times bestselling author Keith O'Brien, 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

“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.
About the author
The New York Times Book Review has hailed Keith O’Brien for his “keen reportorial eye” and “lyrical” writing style. He has written two books, been a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, and contributed to National Public Radio for more than a decade.

O’Brien’s radio stories have appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition, as well as Marketplace, Here & Now, Only a Game, and This American Life. He has also written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Politico, Slate, Esquire.com, and the Oxford American, among others.

He is a former staff writer for both the Boston Globe and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. As a newspaper reporter, he won multiple awards, including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. He was born in Cincinnati and graduated from Northwestern University.