Charlie Hustle

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

By: Keith O'Brien

Narrated by: Ellen Adair, Keith O'Brien

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

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY

“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.

Well researched and written for interest and comprehension

The narrator’s overly dramatic emotive style was both distracting and annoying. It is the worst feature of audible books. Also mispronunciation of proper names in this book. Please be more careful.

Sad life

I truly idolized Pete as a player when I was growing up.

I was a freshman in college when he was banished from baseball.

I wish he would have had a relationship with God.

learned all the things I did not know about Pete Rose

I liked the timeline. glad the story went in order and didn't jump all around

Narrator not appropriate

A good story that brought up Parts of Pete Rose’s fascinating and self- destructive life. However, having this female narrator doing this book would be like Howard Cosell doing an Ice Dancing book. Too much empathetic voice inflections.

The truth about Pete Rose

Pete was so addicted to betting not just baseball but anything he could place a bet. What a waste.