The Bookshelf Conversation #184: Keith O’Brien

I’ve long believed that the death of a famous athlete leads to renewed interest in any books about him, a theory that holds when you look at the weekly Baseball Best-Sellers.

Sure enough, the recent passing of Pete Rose provided an uptick in sales of books about the controversial superstar and since Keith O’Brien wrote Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and The Last Glory Days of Baseball — the most recent and most complete bio to date — he was the go-to resource for the media seeking comment on the late great Rose (as well as to receive that aforementioned bump).

O’Brien is a New York Times best-selling author, not for Charlie Hustle, but for Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History. I’ve always been curious as to what that means/how is that determined, as well as whether having that honor is similar to an inductee to Cooperstown benefiting from being able to add “HOF” to his autograph. As a baseball-loving native-born Cincinnatian, O’Brien seems like a logical choice for this latest addition to the Rose examination and how athletes are subject to human frailties just like the rest of us.

Sidenote: My profound apologies to KB and the audience: I’m usually pretty careful about such things, but my cat, Floyd, somehow ended up in the office and I felt I had to let him out, lest he insinuate himself into the conversation at some crucial point. Normally, you wouldn’t have seen that but I failed to check the Zoom settings to show only the speaker, so both O’Brien and I were on at the same time. Life, you know? But we learn from our mistakes so I’ll make sure I’m in an animal-free zone in the future.