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

ISBN: 0593317378

Author: O'Brien, Keith

Condition: New

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A captivating chronicle of the incredible story of one of Americas 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 JournalA NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHYBaseball biography at its best. With Charlie Hustle, Pete Rose finally gets the book he deserves, and baseball fans get the book weve 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 LifePete 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 wasnt.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 Americas 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 OBrien chronicles how Rose fell so far from being Americas 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 OBrien shows is that while Pete Rose didnt change, America and baseball did. This is the story of that change.