Rage & The Pride

With The Rage and the Pride, Oriana Fallaci breaks a silence that has lasted for ten years. She breaks it in the wake of the apocalypse that, on the morning of September 11th 2001, not far from her home in Manhattan, disintegrated the Twin Towers and incinerated thousands of people.

This edition is enriched by a dramatic preface in which Oriana Fallaci explains how the book was born and, considering the reasons why Islamic terrorism will not end with the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, describes the global reality of the Jihad: the Holy War. A preface in which Oriana Fallaci takes us by surprise, talking also about herself: about her work, about her disdainful isolation, about her rigorous and hard choices.

Often slipping into personal memories, enlightening episodes of her life, she talks about the themes related to September 11th 2001: America, Europe, Italy, the West, the Islamic world, the Christian world, us. Above all, us. With her well-known courage she launches pitiless accusations and furious invectives. With her brutal sincerity she hurls the lucid ideas and the passions, the uncomfortable truths and the reflections, the ideas that almost all of us have but do not dare to say, or don't dare to say at loud voice.

What in her preface Fallaci calls "a little book" is on the contrary a great book. A precious book, a book that shakes our consciences. But it is also the portrait of a soul. Her soul. It will remain within us like a thorn into our minds and into our hearts.

As a writer, she is translated in twenty-one languages and thirty countries. Her fame is immense in Italy where The Rage and the Pride has sold one million copies over seven months and in France where it has been number one bestseller since its publication in May. For this American edition Oriana Fallaci has personally translated in English the Italian text and added several pages, also concerning the United States.

"Fallaci is capable of hard-hitting, trenchant social criticism, but she fails to accomplish that in this impassioned but sloppy post-September 11 critique....Fallaci's love for America, her adopted home, and her critique of European intellectuals' perverse contempt for it, is laced with a bile that may lead readers to suspect her of anti-Arab bias." Publishers Weekly

"There is nothing moderate about this white-hot polemic — which is both a vice and a virtue. It's a vice, because Fallaci's extreme vituperation tends to undermine the strength of her argument....In the main, though, Fallaci's lack of restraint is bracing, even invigorating, first of all because she has the truth on her side, and secondly because she intends through her rage to shock awake a noble civilization hypnotized by multiculturalist mumbo-jumbo, so that it might rise to preserve itself while it still may." Rod Dreher, The National Review

"The Rage and the Pride is unfocused, but it is not hysterical, and, though uncompromising, is certainly not visceral....The idiosyncratic translation, the scatological cursing, and the self-righteousness all sporadically undermine The Rage and the Pride. But none of it undermines the emotional effect." David Harsanyi, The Weekly Standard

With The Rage and the Pride Oriana Fallaci breaks a ten year silence. The silence she kept until September 11's apocalypse in her Manhattan house. She breaks it with a deafening noise. In Europe this book has caused and causes a turmoil never registered in decades. Polemics, discussions, debates, hearty consents and praises, wild attacks. And a million copies sold in Italy alone, where it still is at the bestsellers' top. Hundreds of thousands in France, in Germany, in Spain: the other countries where it has become the Number One Bestseller. Around a dozen the translations in which it will soon appear.

With The Rage and the Pride Oriana Fallaci breaks a ten year silence. The silence she kept until September 11's apocalypse in her Manhattan house. She breaks it with a deafening noise. In Europe this book has caused and causes a turmoil never registered in decades. Polemics, discussion, debates, hearty consents and praises, wild attacks. And a million copies sold in Italy where it still is at the bestsellers' top. Hundreds of thousands in France, in Germany, in Spain: the other countries where it has become the Number one Bestseller. Around a dozen translations will soon appear.

With her well-known courage Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, the lenience of the West. With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct. With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us.

The text is enriched by a dramatic preface in which Oriana Fallaci reveals how The Rage and the Pride was born, grew up, and detachedly calls it "my small book." In addition, a preface in which she tells significant episodes of her extraordinary life and explains her unreachable isolation, her demanding and inflexible choices. Because of this too, what she calls "my small book" is in reality a great book. A precious book, a book that shakes our conscience. It is also the portrait of a soul. Her soul. No doubt it will remain as a thorn pierced inside our brains and our hearts.

Oriana Fallaci is Florentine and lives mostly in New York. In awarding her an honorary degree in Literature, the Dean of Chicago's Columbia College defined her "one of the most-read and best-loved writers in the world." As a war-correspondent she has covered the great majority of our time's conflicts: from Vietnam to the Middle East; from the 1956 Hungarian insurrection to the 1970s Latin America upheavals; from the 1968 massacre of Mexico City, where she was seriously wounded, to the Gulf War.

Her books, which include world-known novels, are translated in twenty-one languages and thirty countries. For this American edition she has personally translated The Rage and the Pride in English and added several pages concerning the United States.