Rating: 
Summary: It's About Time!
Review: This is the J'Accuse of our era. How rare is it for a respected media figure to come out and state the obvious - that our culture is at war (not one of its own choosing) with Islam? It's so rare that it is nonexistant. While some may imply this, they are quickly beaten into sumbission by the multitude of Islamists (the "Sons of Allah" as Fallaci calls them and their countless leftist supporters). It is enough to turn a lifelong democrat republican.This is a much needed wake up call which is supported by the seeminly infinite number of atrocities committed by muslims - and which are condoned or explained away by their Western comrades. I look forward to purchasing several more editions of this work - not only because its opponents are working to have it banned - but also to begin spreading a message the truth of which we all know in our hearts but so far have been unwilling to admit.
Rating:
Summary: Aim. Fire. Direct hit.
Review: This is the written word that many of us who lived in the Middle East saw, heard and felt every day, but could not say becauase we feared torture. Ms. Fallaci has been in the same countries and seen the same fear. Now in America, she has taken the challenge to speak a harsh truth about the direction of hate and those who yield that hate. Now that I no longer live in that fear, I use words like Ms. Fallaci's to bolster the courage to change my world and the lives of those around me. You don't have to follow this book blindly, but you can derive simple truths that you can implement in your daily life. Read this and change your lives too. Or those who hate us will change it for us.
Rating:
Summary: Passion and Reason
Review: A warning for the world. A cry for Integrity in those who rule us. A cry of frustration and fear born of our individual smallness. Ms. Fallaci never fails to bring vivid, intense thought to her readers. Right or wrong, whether we agree with her or not, we need her. A rare combination of both Passion and Reason. It seems Humanity cries through her voice.
Rating:
Summary: A wake up call...
Review: While not great literature this book packs a tremendous punch. Ms. Fallaci translated the book herself from the original Italian. The resultant English is somewhat fractured but the voice is authentic, original and an assault on political correctness. The knee-jerk response to this book would be to condemn it as a racist diatribe against the Moslem religion. To do so would be to ignore the facts on the ground, the rise of radical Islam, the daily atrocities against Western society of which the destruction of the World Trade Center is simply the most prominent.
Rating: 
Summary: We Asked For More...
Review: Although Oriana Fallaci is probably best known for her polemical journalism of the 1970s, she is also only one of two people in the last several years to have the distinction of raising the pulse of the staff of "The Economist" to levels above a warm corpse (Naomi Klein is the other). Indeed, "The Economist" seemed bowled over by Ms. Fallaci's uncanny ability to give voice to the deep and not wholly unfounded fear and loathing many in the Western world feel for fundamentalist Islam. However, "The Rage and the Pride" leaves such people begging for more. Ms. Fallaci spreads her venom too thin and spits it at far too many sitting ducks (Berlusconi, et al). One might have hoped that Ms. Fallaci, as she so often did in the past, would have hissed what the apologists of Islamic terrorism dare not.
Rating: 
Summary: A two-hour rant from a cranky Italian lady
Review: Fallaci's 200-page rant reads quickly (as quickly as it was written, apparently), and there are even a few interesting insights scattered among the rubble. Ultimately, the book is directed more at Italy than the United States, and won't tell Americans anything we don't already know. In fact, the book may be far less credible over here. Fallaci's English is inflected with so many sentence fragments, misspellings and untranslatable Italian idioms that it would flunk a freshman writing course. Her attempts to explain American history and culture sound as if they descended from an alternate universe. Ditto her attack on militaristic religious fundamentalism -- except in this case (as we are learning), she might not be altogether wrong ... _The Rage and the Pride_ is filled with obvious anti-Islamic prejudice (as well as several gratuitous attacks on Gays and feminists) which most Americans, I think, will find repugnant. The Rev. Jerry Falwell had to apologize for less inflammatory statements. In addition, Fallaci could have used a good fact-checker, or even a spell-checker. But her pugilistic personality is interesting. I'll admit I enjoyed a few hours in her company. That's a feeble reason to recommend a book, so I'll just advise you not to buy it and stop there.
Rating: 
Summary: Laughable
Review: This book was replete with errors and fantasies galore! the poor lady seems obsessed with this idea of hordes of savages raging through her beloved city and destroying it. The work contained many factual errors and was reminscent of the theory of Jewish conspiracy theories that were found in the early half of the 20th century (especially the comparison of a religious group of people to rats).
The idea that a group of humans numbering 1.3 billion cannot be so monolithic seems lost on the author. Sadly she helps the cause she professes to loathe. It's precisely this type of work which has extremists licking their lips telling recruits this is what the West thinks of you and acts as more recruiting propoganda.
Rating:
Summary: Without A Doubt
Review: It is, without a doubt, not the definitive, thorough, detailed work of a political analyst. But it is a sermon that reaches heart and soul, and when thought over for a few days, permeates the mind. There is no question that this book must be read, whether you believe yourself to be liberal or conservative or any other meaningless distinction. The question is: are you brave enough to draw the consequences? Or are you cowardly enough to ignore what not standing up to THEM will entail? In this question, Fallaci is, like Hemingway or Any Rand, an author who will separate the wheat from the chaff. Read it. It's one of your only chances at seeing, especially if you are one of those Euro-philes that has no clue that Europe itself is part of the problem (this coming from a European).
Rating: 
Summary: What a rant!
Review: Worth reading even if you totally disagree with everything Ms. Fallaci says, for the sheer intensity of expression. It's destined to join the short-list of classic rants. She did her own translation, and her sometimes fractured English contributes a good deal to the effect. I was sent to the dictionary more than once (and discovered, to my surprise, that "parvises" actually is an English word). The odd hyphenation adds even mo-re to the effect. Be that as it may, one must admit that she makes some telling points. It seems that every day's news brings some new Moslem outrage -- the attacks on Pim Fortuyn and Bertrand Delanoe are, I fear, just the beginning of the religion's crusade (or, as Fallaci puts it, "anti-crusade") against the values of pluralistic societies, especially in Europe (but America's day is coming). Her occasional homophobic comments are a bit grating: American society "deifies" homosexuality, she says... Hello?.
Rating:
Summary: Lacerating
Review: Fallaci, one of the greatest living journalists, broke a decades-long silence to write this blistering critique of European reaction to Sept. 11, of European political correctness, and of Islamofascism. The bulk of the book was typed in a white heat just weeks after the Sept. 11 massacre. It has earned her almost daily death threats. Yet it has only been published in America now, more than a year later. In fact, most of this book is not written for Americans, though it says passionately and magnificently many of the things many Americans feel. Her picture is one you will recognize if you've read some of the Western thinkers who spoke up after Sept. 11 -- Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, V.S. Naipaul, to name three. They decried the Islamofascist attack on the core liberal values of Western civilization: freedom, equality, toleration. They reminded fellow critics of Western culture that the bulk of it was worth fighting for. Her targets are the breed of European intellectuals she contemptuously calls "cicadas." She assails the crypto-Marxists who were so fond of the line about religion being the opiate of the masses only when it applied to the benign modern Christian churches of their own lands. She confronts the strident feminists who couldn't spare a word on behalf of brutalized, enslaved, mutilated Muslim women. Fallaci, even more than the others, writes from the gut, with a furious energy that the book's title barely contains. Her prose takes you right back to the writing that was done in the immediate wake of the slaughter, when the stench still hung over New York City and recovery crews picked through "a brown mud that seems like ground coffee but in reality is organic matter: the remains of the bodies in a flash disintegrated, incinerated." It is a style that is characteristic and cannot be duplicated at any distance from the event. Fallaci is no armchair observer of the Muslim world; she has traveled extensively in it and interviewed everyone from Khomeini to Arafat. She had seen into the rotten hearts of the people who plotted these attacks. And she knew what she wanted to say about them. She mocks the liberals of Europe who treat all the Muslim emigrants flooding their lands as "poor little things." And to the bin Ladens and their admirers, she is unsparingly blunt. She envisions the Muslim fanatics coming after the artwork of her beloved Florence, as they did to the Bamiyan Buddhas or the World Trade Center: "And should the poor-little-things destroy one of those treasures, only one, I swear: it is I who would become a holy-warrior. It is I who would become a murderer. So listen to me, you followers of a God who preaches an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I was born in the war. I grew up in the war. About war I know a lot and believe me: I have more balls than your kamikazes who find the courage to die only when dying means killing thousands of people. Babies included. War you wanted, war you want? Good." Having broken her silence, Fallaci takes the opportunity for delayed retorts to some of her critics. They are kept parenthetical -- short but piercing. The kick at Jane Fonda is hilarious. This English translation was done by the author. Her prose is straighforward, vigorous English, yet it is sprinkled with the quirks of one who speaks English as a second tongue. Writing about how in her imagination she still can see the Bamiyan Buddhas (the ones the Taliban dynamited): "I see them because about them I know all what I should." Yet even these grammatical lapses -- writing English as though it were Italian -- make "The Rage and the Pride" seem all the more vivid and furious.
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