Well, it’s still there. If it weren’t there, these books would go unread. But Mr. O’Reilly, who either works with a collaborator or was born with a ghostwriter’s gift for filling space with platitudes (“as Bob Dylan sang, the times were a-changin’ ”), can make himself sound tough and blunt on the page, and can even turn his bullying into backhanded humor.

“Of course, many people do not see the wrongs that I see because they don’t see the world the way that I do,” he says. “All of us should feel very sorry for them.” Of a childhood diet filled with junk food, he says, “if it’s true that ‘you are what you eat,’ then I am one sweet guy, simply because of cereal intake alone.”

One sweet guy: for even his fondest readers, these are not the first three words Mr. O’Reilly (a man who counts “pinheads” as a favorite word) brings to mind. But he presents himself plausibly as the strong-willed product of a strict Roman Catholic education. (“A bold fresh piece of humanity” was one nun’s way of calling him a wiseguy. He cherishes that nickname enough to use it several hundred times here.)

He grew up with starkly black-and-white ideas of good and evil. And he has been seeing the world that way ever since. “Summing up, all child abuse is evil, and most abusers are bad people,” he writes in a chapter that also daringly takes on rap lyrics, horror films and terrorists. “We don’t have to get more complicated than that.” So we don’t. But we don’t get all that controversial, either.

Image Bill OReilly Credit... Lynn Youngen

At the sincere heart of Mr. O’Reilly’s memories is his father, whose example the son has apparently spent his life repudiating. The senior Mr. O’Reilly is recalled with affection but also with constant criticism: he was too weak and cautious for his son’s taste. Describing his father as a man so cowed by the Great Depression that he spent his life working for “a corporate giant that could not have cared less about him,” young Billy, born in 1949, determined to put himself on a different course. So this book fondly summons the stickball, name-calling and proudly thuggish atmosphere that taught him how to fight.