“It’s very easy to think about Pete Rose’s story as a baseball story,” says three-time New York Times best-selling author Keith O’Brien. “It’s far more interesting to think of Pete Rose’s story as a human story.”
O’Brien’s latest, from Penguin Random House, is Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball. It’s the realest, most honest look yet at Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader whose off-field gambling exploits saw him banned from the game for life. The book, reading like the slow dismantling of a Romanesque sculpture, chipping away page by page until there’s nothing left, spares no details.