Rating: 
Summary: From the heart, a ray of hope
Review: Whose rage and whose pride is spotlighted here? I ask because I'd somehow assumed the title of The Rage and the Pride referred to the Muslim community about whom this book is directed. They hate us and want to kill us. They are a proud culture. You've heard all this I'm sure. But the rage and the pride are both Oriana Fallaci's own, and they should also be all of ours.
Every single word of this book is true. Even the false ones. Fallaci makes no pretense whatsoever that this is a history book. Nor is it a political science text, a cultural studies tome, or even a studious essay. It is, upfront, a personal defense of everything she holds dear and a diatribe against that which is ugly in the world. I can't say I agree with every word here. Fallaci does tend to go off towards the end with some critiques of contemporary Western culture that may or may not be to your liking but has little to do with the main topic. But on that main topic, even though I may agree with less than one hundred percent of what she says (but certainly not very much less at all. Actually, I can't think of an example right now, but I'm sure there was something.), Fallaci speaks out with a brutal honesty that can only be admired. Enough is enough! Were I to shorten these 187 pages to three words, these would be those three words. Enough is enough.
Enough with apologizing to the world for Western civilization. Enough with appeasing the cultural thugs that kill us and call us inconsistent for fighting back, however meekly. Robert Jackson (chief justice of the United States and chief prosecutor at Nuremberg) pointed out once that the United States Constitution is not a suicide pact. Well the same is true tenfold for Western civilization and perhaps it's a lesson we would be well advised to learn someday. Enough with letting imams set up shop in our peaceful cities so they can preach jihad to the poor masses that are so horribly oppressed by the countries that they worked so hard to get to, and enough with letting those poor oppressed masses think we've committed a crime against them by asking that they please behave. As I write this review in November of 2004, I have to wonder if people in the Netherlands are starting to wake up to some of Fallaci's points (and if Spain ever will).
I've noted some of the invective spewed forth against Fallaci in other reviews. These are false. Someone reading passages in isolation might think Fallaci is crossing some lines, but anyone who actually read the book and paid attention would note some distinctions. First, to point out the tone, I would suggest that this book is unedited. Fallaci herself points out that something she wrote twenty pages earlier is wrong (she had said Muslim women essentially get what they deserve for going along with the system. She corrected it later, pointing out that the system is explicitly misogynist and contemptuous towards women and they often have no choice in their brutalization). I point this out to show that this is a first draft, a rough sketch of her thoughts and feelings at the moment. Another author would have corrected the earlier pages. But even so, Fallaci gives proper credit where it is due. She is not a racist. There is no suggestion of genetic inferiority made. She even takes a sentence or two to point out that she found the late King Hussein of Jordan a personable guy, and she takes several pages to tell a somewhat moving tale of the late Prime Mister Ali Bhutto of Pakistan (before the Muslim true-believers hung him). Western civilization, for all its obvious greatness, is not the only source of goodness in Fallaci's world, as evidenced by her glowing praise of the Dalai Lama (granted, this is not uncommon for most people). But the main reason the criticisms against Fallaci are false is simply that she is specific. She never once writes `All Muslims are bastards'. What she does write is specific criticisms of Islam, of Muslim behavior she has witnessed or knows about. In some of the most obviously disdainful passages, Fallaci writes about when a group of Muslims set up a tent in the middle of Florence, outside a cathedral, to protest some immigration plan. To show what great citizens they were, they proceeded to behave in the ugliest manner possible. Special attention was paid, apparently, to urinating on the side of the cathedral. So some of Fallaci's most colorful portrayals of Muslims are not generalizations (though they may be common), but rather they are specific. They are things she witnessed on the street, right in front of her. Fallaci makes no claim to loving or respecting anything about Islamic culture. Nor should she. But to make outrageous claims against her of the sorts I read here is irresponsible and untrue. It does, of course, prove many of her points.
I liked this book. Yes, it could have used some editing, especially in the beginning. And the introduction is clearly written for Italians, with numerous allusions to specific Italian names from history. The language is rough in a grammatical sense, since she translates it herself. The reader will get used to this, and the effect in the end is, I think, for the best. It's a rough-around-the-edges book, and probably reads the same way in Italian as in English. But it's an emotionally satisfying work, even cathartic, if I should be so bold as to use phrases from pop psychology. It is highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: prejudice
Review: This book is just full of hatred and prejudice. It could have been written by a fanatic of any religion or ideology.
Rating: 
Summary: Oriana Opens Her Heart
Review: Oriana Fallaci simply has the guts to say what many Westerners feel, but are afraid to articulate. Political Correctness has infected the body politic of Europe and America, and it just might be our downfall. Our over reliance on being super sensitive to every culture and nation is beyond pathetic, it's suicidal. Evil does exist, and Western Civilization is facing a movement within Islam which is totally opposed to our ideals, our morality, our Judeo Christian ethos. WE ARE AT WAR, and until the morons in the media, academia, and the utopians in Hollywood, etc. (the Usual Suspects) understand this fact, then, Europe and America is in grave danger. It is time for the good hearted Muslims to rise up, take control of their religion, have a REFORMATION that brings them in line with the 21st Century, and then, perhaps, we can stem this trend towards the New Crusades. Until then, tight immigration controls should be put on all men and women coming from despotic fundmentalist Islamic regimes. We just can't trust them. It is 1937 again, everybody,
Iran and their allies are on the move.
Rating:
Summary: The Rage and The Pride
Review: A book that is a must read for all Americans! I am especially impressed with Fallaci's down to earth wisdom. A marvelous albeit little book that is filled with enormous insight!
Rating:
Summary: Help! The barbarians are at the gates!
Review: I think one has to be in the proper mood to read such a book. I sure was. I'd read a few too many dry tomes about the technical aspects of monotheist civilization. This book makes the author's point of view quite clear: she's telling us all exactly how she feels about the attacks of September 11, 2001. Still, the sincerity Fallaci shows is refreshing. I found this book fascinating, and I recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: acid polemic, charming memoire, and EVER provocative
Review: Fallaci has the reputation of an irascible moral purist, a radical democrat, and she certainly lives up to that here. This book, written in response immediately following the 9/11 attacks, demonstrates that she has lost none of her political passion. It is as if she vomitted it all out in a single sitting, which is not too far off the mark as she says she lived on coffee and didn't sleep for weeks while she wrote. On the one hand, there is her outrage at what occured, not only with the Muslim world that spawned such dangerous fundamentalists, but also at the reactions of the politicians in the West and in particular in Europe. All I can say is that her condemnations are not terribly nuanced: there is no acknowledgment of moderate moslems and no patience with the all-too-human hypocracy of the "critics" of the US. While this is rather tiresome after a while, it should not overshadow the fact that her perspective and experience as a celebrated journalist are indeed unique and penetrating. But her rhetoric all too easily soars to excess. In a diatribe against colored immigrants in Italy, for example, she flatly charges that they don't work much, that they routinely indulge in sexual assault, and that they cannot be absorbed into Italian civilization but will instead destroy it. That is certainly not racist, but there is real bile there. On the other hand, she gives some wonderful glimpses into her mind and its development, from the moral integrity of her parents to her meetings with such world leaders as the Dalai Lama (he gets an A+) or Yassar Arafat (D-). In a way, I wish that she would write a memoir. Also, she lets on that she has terminal cancer, that she loves New York, that America is the guarantor of the West's freedom. It is a good performance and highly interesting. I read this in Italian and really enjoyed the language: vivid and full of bite, very useful for the development of vocabulary. Recommended.
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