Oriana fallaci biography of donald

The airplane flies high above an ocean immersed in darkness. Suddenly, the windows are bathed in light. “Look, Oriana, it’s the aurora borealis,” her nephew whispers. She remains silent. Dazed with weakness, she has dozed off. She sits in her reclined seat, draped in a fur coat. It’s September 4, 2006, and Oriana is on her way back to Florence. The tumor is in its terminal stage. No commercial flight from New York is willing to take her, so they have resorted to chartering a private plane. For several weeks, she has been surviving on sugar water; she weighs only sixty-six pounds. In truth, she never weighed much more than that: five foot one, ninety-two pounds. She often jokes, “When people meet me, they’re surprised by how little there is of me. I just spread my arms and say, ‘That’s all there is!’” This trip is her decision. She has lived in New York for almost five decades, but she wants things to end where they began. The cabin light is kept low to protect her failing eyes. Two doctors, both women, accompany her, in case of an emergency. But she barely moves during the whole trip; she sits, folded in on herself, immersed in memories. Florence advances slowly to meet her, bringing with it the past.

1 . A Family in Which Nobody Smiles

“I don’t know anything about how my father and my mother met. The only clue to the mystery of my birth is a phrase my mother used to repeat: ‘It all happened because of a hat full of cherries.’” Among all the family stories she heard as a child, this was the detail she loved the most: a bright red hat, worn like a beacon. Years later, placed on the head of someone other than her mother, it would supply the title to her posthumous novel, Un cappello pieno deiciliege (A hat full of cherries). Anything else is speculation. The meeting must have occurred somewhere in Florence on a late summer afternoon in 1928, one of thos

Italian journalist (1929–2006)

Oriana Fallaci (Italian:[oˈrjaːnafalˈlaːtʃi]; 29 June 1929 – 15 September 2006) was an Italian journalist and author. A member of the Italian resistance movement during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her "long, aggressive and revealing interviews" with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Fallaci's book Interview with History contains interviews with Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Willy Brandt, Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Henry Kissinger, South Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, and North Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp during the Vietnam War. The interview with Kissinger was published in The New Republic, with Kissinger describing himself as "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse". Kissinger later wrote that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press".

Fallaci also interviewed Deng Xiaoping, Andreas Papandreou, Ayatollah Khomeini, Haile Selassie, Lech Wałęsa, Muammar Gaddafi, Mário Soares, George Habash, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others. After retirement, she returned to the spotlight after writing a series of controversial articles and books critical of Islam that aroused condemnation for Islamophobia as well as popular support.

Early life

Fallaci was born in Florence, Italy, on 29 June 1929. Her father Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Italian fascist

While one could have different opinions about La Fallaci, as she was known, it was impossible not to admit that her meetings with powerful figures were demonstrations of journalistic ferocity. Her questions were as sharp as knives. They could end a political career, or cut down a luminary’s fame and reputation. She would prepare obsessively, and her interviews would often touch a raw nerve. Nobody could escape her clever and pointed queries.

“My questions are brutal because the search for the truth is a kind of surgery. And surgery hurts,” she once said, according to the extraordinary biography “Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend,” by Cristina De Stefano, recently translated and published in English. “Most of my colleagues don’t have the courage to ask the right questions.”

It’s worth noting that Fallaci was never disrespectful to her subjects — she was merely seeking answers. Her interviews became battlefields, whether she was sitting down with Henry Kissinger, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or a Hollywood movie star. “An interview is an extremely difficult thing, a mutual examination, a test of nerves and focus,” Fallaci said, according to De Stefano’s biography. “In my interviews I don’t act only on my opinions, but also on my emotions. All of my interviews are dramas.” She continued: “I’m the one interpreting the facts. I always write in the first person. And what am I? I’m a human being.”

You always knew what Fallaci wanted to learn — her intentions and meanings were clear and simple. “I detest difficult words, complicated and impenetrable,” she said with regard to her interviewing process. “I learned to detest them from my mother, who was highly intelligent but not highly educated … My mother used to say, ‘Write simply, please! I want to understand as well.’”

Fallaci also understood that defiance was a fundamental trait for a journalist. “To me, being a journalist means being disobedient,” she wrote t