The Real Deal
I was on a red-eye to Denver last week - one of those 6 AM flights where you're surrounded by people who made better life choices than you - and I needed something to fill the time. Geronimo's autobiography had been sitting in my queue for months. Under four hours. Primary source material. No ghostwriter padding it with "thought leadership" nonsense. Sold.
Bottom line: This is what my parents did instinctively. Now it has a TED talk. Except Geronimo never got a TED talk. He got 27 years as a prisoner of war and died in Oklahoma, a thousand miles from home. That context hit me harder than any business memoir I've read this year.
Look, here's the thing - this isn't a polished narrative. It's an old man sitting across from you, telling you about his life while someone writes it down. The structure is basically: creation myth, childhood, then raid after raid after raid. Some listeners find this repetitive. I get it. But there's something raw about the pattern. Geronimo isn't trying to craft a hero's journey. He's just... telling you what happened. The Mexican soldiers killed his mother, his wife, his three kids. So he spent decades making them pay. That's not a story arc. That's a life.
Sue Anderson's Approach
Sue Anderson narrates this with what I'd call "appropriate restraint." Some reviewers call her monotone. I'd push back on that. (Jenny would say I'm being harsh. Jenny is right. But still.) There's a quiet gravitas here that fits the material. This isn't a thriller. It's testimony. Anderson reads it like she's reading a deposition from history - steady, clear, letting the words do the work.
Her pronunciation of Apache place names and terminology is solid. No stumbling, no weird pauses where you can tell the narrator is sounding something out. For a LibriVox recording - which, let's be honest, can be hit or miss - the audio quality is clean. No weird background noise, no production issues.
Does she bring dramatic flair? No. But I'm not sure dramatic flair would serve this. When Geronimo describes finding his family murdered, you don't need the narrator to perform grief. The words are enough. Anderson seems to understand that.
What Actually Lands
The business consultant in me kept finding parallels I wasn't expecting. Geronimo talks about treaties - agreements made, agreements broken, the calculation of when to fight and when to negotiate. He describes leading 39 people while 5,000 U.S. Army soldiers hunted them. That's not just history. That's asymmetric competition. That's resource allocation under extreme constraint.
My parents would've understood this guy. Not the violence - they ran a dry cleaner, not a guerrilla campaign - but the relentlessness. The refusal to accept terms that meant giving up everything that mattered. The 14-hour days because the alternative was worse.
The book also gave me a much better understanding of how the "Wild West" actually worked. Spoiler: it wasn't romantic. It was bloody, chaotic, and the people writing the official histories weren't the ones getting displaced. Geronimo's perspective is subjective - of course it is - but that's the point. We have plenty of accounts from the other side. This is his.
Fair Warning
Okay, so - some caveats. The narrative is heavy on battles and raids. If you're looking for deep introspection or philosophical musing, you're not getting it. Geronimo was a warrior, and his story reflects that. There's violence throughout. Not gratuitous, but matter-of-fact in a way that might be harder for some listeners.
The pacing can drag in spots. I listened at 1.5x (my 2.0x speed couldn't save this one during the middle chapters where it's raid-treaty-raid-treaty on repeat). And because it's an oral history transcribed in 1905, there are gaps. Things Geronimo chose not to discuss, or couldn't discuss, or that got lost in translation.
Also - and this is a LibriVox thing, not specific to this recording - there's no production value. No music, no sound effects, nothing but Anderson's voice. Some people prefer that. I did, for this material. But if you're coming from slick Audible productions, adjust your expectations.
Who Should Listen
Best for: Anyone interested in American history from a perspective that doesn't get taught in most schools. Students, researchers, or honestly just people who want to understand what "the other side" of Manifest Destiny looked like. It's under four hours. You can knock it out in a weekend of chores.
Skip if: You need dynamic narration to stay engaged, or you're sensitive to descriptions of violence and warfare. Also skip if you want a comprehensive biography - this is Geronimo's version, not an academic treatment.
The key takeaway is worth the listen. The repetitive middle sections? Not so much. But the opening creation myth and the final chapters - where Geronimo, now an old man selling autographs at the World's Fair, asks Roosevelt to let him go home - those sections justify the whole thing.
He never got to go home. He died at Fort Sill in 1909. Still a prisoner.
That ending stayed with me longer than most business books I've reviewed this year. And it's free on LibriVox. Pretty hard to argue with that ROI.
