This is a good introductory biography of Oriana. The author does a good job with the early life and her work and she access to personal papers. For those unfamiliar with her work all the highlights are included. The author remains objective until the end. She seems to be a little dismissive of Oriana's work after September 11th. The text is accompanied with lots of historical photographs. I enjoyed reading the book and found it very interesting. It did encourage me to seek out Oriana's fictional work which I was not familiar with. Enjoy

“Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend”, by Cristina de Stefano, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss (Other Press, 2017. First published in Italian as “Oriana, una donna”, Rizzoli, 2013), is a fast-pacing account of Oriana Fallaci’s tumultuous life.

The controversial Italian journalist and novelist was born in Florence, in 1929. Despite being poor, her parents were avid readers, and Oriana grew up surrounded by books. Her father, Edoardo Fallaci, made his living as a woodcarver and was very active in the Italian anti-fascist resistance during World War II. Brought up by her father to be “as tough as a boy”, Oriana was taught to shoot and hunt at a very young age. When she was about 14 years old, she became a courier for the resistance, smuggling hand grenades inside heads of lettuce in the basket of her bicycle and carrying secret messages to anti-fascist fighters.

Brought up by her parents under the imperative to fight fascism, Oriana was used to challenging authority from a very young age. Moreover, her mother Tosca, a housewife who had not been able to pursue her studies due to her gender and social class, had strongly encouraged her daughter to study and to have a career. After the war, Fallaci entered medical school, and started working as a journalist to pay for her studies. Soon, she would drop university and become a full-time reporter – by then, largely a “man’s profession” in Italy. Years later, Oriana would say that she became a journalist in part to “vindicate her mother”.

Initially dismissed for being a woman, Fallaci battled her way up from social columnist and celebrity reporter to celebrated war correspondent, novelist and political interviewer, breaking boundaries for women in her field in Italy. After covering celebrities in Rome and in Hollywood, in the early 50’s, Oriana spent extended periods at NASA in the early 60’s, reporting on the U.S. space program. In the late sixties, she headed for Vietnam to cover the war. She soon became one of the world’s preeminent war correspondents, flying from Saigon to Karachi, from Teheran and Mexico City to Tel Aviv.

Oriana is best known for her confrontational interviewing tactics, and the book does a good job at sampling some of her finest moments. For example, when she asked Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya: “Do you know you are so unloved and unliked?”; when she asked Henry Kissinger: “To what degree does power fascinate you?”, in an interview which is widely considered to have contributed to his political demise; or when she began an interview with Gina Lollobrigida by stating: “I don’t think you’re as stupid as people say”, and following it up with a question about the immoral nature of the amount of money actors are payed. When interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1979, Oriana criticized the condition of women in Iran. Khomeini responded, “If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to follow it. The chador is only for young and respectable women.” Oriana immediately took off the chador she was wearing, and said, “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” Angry, Khomeini, interrupted the interview and left the room, but Fallaci refused to leave, insisting she would only leave after getting the interview she had been promised. Khomeini conceded her point and returned the next day to complete the interview, but, rather than be diplomatic, Oriana continued the interview on the same point they had left it at the previous day: “Let’s start where we left off yesterday: you were saying that I was indecent…”

Even her extensive notes on people who refused to be interviewed by her are illuminating. For instance, her preparatory notes for an interview with Pope John Paul II are full of sharp questions, such as: “What do you think of the Inquisition? Why is the Church so obsessed with sex? Can one ask a pope if he has ever been in love? Why not? Why do you expect a lack of political engagement by Latin American priests but not by Polish priests?”

The book also does a good job at presenting the key aspects of Oriana’s writing style. She never shied away from placing herself at the centre, as if the interview was a stage and she was one of the main players. By structuring the interview as a literary piece, and by inserting in it her own personal feelings, Oriana challenged the ideas of objectivity and neutrality in journalism. “I think there is still a place to be very personal and literary in journalism.” While never inventing the facts, she managed to be very creative in putting the pieces of the story together. She was sharp, witty, antagonistic, uncompromising and, more often than not, very entertaining.

“She’s never detached. She undertakes each meeting with the same passion and radical approach: “In my interviews I don’t act only on my opinions but also on my emotions. All of my interviews are dramas. I involve myself even on a physical level.” She doesn’t believe in objectivity: “When I take the subway in New York and see ads for newspapers that claim ‘Facts not Opinions,’ I laugh so hard the whole subway car shakes. What does that mean? I’m the one interpreting the facts. I always write in the first person.”

The Oriana that emerges from the book dwells in contradiction: a hypochondriac who never feared to fly to violent warzones; an independent woman who was very passionate and romantic, often debasing herself for the man she loved; a truculent person who could be very vulnerable and tender (“She was fragile,” recalled one companion, “but she used aggressiveness as a shield. She attacked first. As a result, Americans were often terrified of her.”); an atheist who admired Pope Benedict; a leftist with Islamophobic tendencies. A self-proclaimed anarchist and individualist, Oriana could often infuriate both sides in a given debate.

The biographer had access to personal papers - notes, manuscripts, journals, letters – and previously unpublished personal testimonies from people who knew Oriana. Written in the present tense, with short sentences and easy vocabulary, the book reads like a fast-paced, action-packed novel. And that can be a little irritating: it gives the impression of being the simplified version of something that remains to be fully analysed. Furthermore, the book reads, at times, like a collage of direct quotes - and, worse still, the source of each quote is not provided by the biographer through footnotes.

Some reviewers commented that the biographer’s style is evocative of Fallaci’s, but I would beg to disagree: De Stefano is too tame to be compared to Fallaci; she is always ready to compromise; she never inserts herself in her narrative, never criticizes Oriana nor analyses her contradictions. Her portrait ends up being too well-mannered and light-hearted, as if De Stefano were too afraid to go beyond what was expected of a well-meaning fan of Fallaci’s work. And that’s a shame.

This shortcoming becomes particularly clear in the chapter on Fallaci’s post- September 11 work, when she published three controversial books about Islam and the West. The books sparked accusations of Islamophobia and destroyed her reputation as a journalist. De Stefano seems to have the good intention of preventing the overshadowing of Oriana’s career by this late episode; the biographer seems to demand that the reader should put Oriana’s late work in perspective – as the work of a sick, old, lonely woman. However, in so doing, De Stefano glosses over Oriana’s contradictions, pigeonholing her, trying to find excuses for Oriana’s own choices – something the Italian journalist would certainly have hated.

De Stefano analyses Oriana’s choices under one simple aspect: the imperative to fight fascism she experienced as a young girl, which shaped her view of life as a tough battle. “The need to oppose fascism, of any type, on the Left or on the Right, is her line in the sand, the measuring stick with which she judges people and governments,” writes the author. However, I think that can be a limiting perspective, because it evades criticism from the start: the Oriana that emerges from the portrait is a larger-than-life personality; not possibly a truculent, arrogant narcissist, but the only hero of her own story, solely driven by the quest for freedom. I think this is a very reducing picture – and not one which Oriana would have fallen for either. It is too tame and neat a version of her. She was more of an unsparing, uncompromising, disobedient, hardcore type.

On the whole, I think the book can be an introduction to Oriana’s life, but it will disappoint the readers who are more familiar with her work.