A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity: A Memoir »

BILL O’REILLY, a three-time Emmy Award winner for excellence in reporting, served as national correspondent for ABC News and as anchor of the nationally syndicated news magazine program Inside Edition before becoming executive producer and anchor of Fox News’s breakout hit The O’Reilly Factor.

The year was 1957, the month September, and I had just turned eight years old. Dwight Eisenhower was President, but in my life it was the diminutive, intense Sister Mary Lurana who ruled, at least in the third-grade class where I was held captive. For reasons you will soon understand, my parents had remanded me to the penal institution of St. Brigid's School in Westbury, New York, a cruel and unusual punishment if there ever was one.

Already, I had barely survived my first two years at St. Brigid's because I was, well, a little nitwit. Not satisfied with memorizing the Baltimore Catechism's fine prose, which featured passages like "God made me to show his goodness and to make me happy with him in heaven," I was constantly annoying my classmates and, of course, the no-nonsense Sister Lurana. With sixty overactive students in her class, she was understandably short on patience. For survival, she had also become quick on the draw.

Then...

Introduction: Reading This Book Will Dramatically Improve Your Life! 1

1 Politics 7

2 Self-Reliance 27

3 Fear 45

4 Evil 59

5 Religion 69

6 Saving the World 89

7 Standing Your Ground 105

8 Standing for Something 117

9 Conservatives Versus Liberals 129

10 Heroes and Zeros 143

11 Men of Adventure 155

12 Slugging it Out 175

13 Power 185

14 Mysteries of the Universe 215

15 And Justice for All 229

16 End of Story 241

Postscript 255