Before or after every speech I give, somebody always asks me, "What is O'Reilly really like?"
My answer is always the same: "What you see on television is what you get off camera. It's the same guy." That much is obvious to anyone who knows him. But what was less clear to me is where he came from.
"A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity," O'Reilly's memoir, answers the question. O'Reilly, it seems, was made not born into his philosophy; rather, his values and personae were hammered into shape like a horseshoe, the blows coming not from a blacksmith's hammer, but from life on the quintessentially American streets of Levittown.
Interspersing stories of his youth with bloviation on topics like the quality of courage and the necessity for self-reliance, O'Reilly makes it clear that his experiences are his philosophy; his biography is his message.
Does he believe in resourcefulness and ingenuity? Does he look down on the nanny state? It all harks back to his job as a kid painting houses.
When his buddy dropped a bucket of white paint on a client's bush, he sawed down the newly decorated plant, replaced it with various branches he collected, quickly cashed the check and was off. When the client noticed that something about the front of his house looked different, O'Reilly hastened to credit his paint job, not the missing bush.
O'Reilly was not the bookish sort. He had no particular interest in anything having to do with the outside world as he grew up. He was a borderline hooligan who Irish mothers must have suspected of "devilment." The title of his book comes from how Sister Lurana described him in grade school.
Most autobiographies relate uncommon stories of great men and women.
We ponder how the extraordinary influences of their early life ma | 
