Pdf / English / 1976 / 376 pages / 50 MB

This book does not claim to be anything but what it is: I mean a direct witness to fourteen political figures of contemporary history. It does not want to promise anything more than it claims, I mean a document straddling journalism and history. Yet it also doesn't want to be considered as a simple collection of interviews for students of power and antipower. I do not feel myself to be, nor will I ever succeed in feeling like, a cold recorder of what I see and hear. On every professional experience I leave shreds of my heart and soul; and 1 participate in what I see or hear as though the matter concerned me personally and were one on which I ought to take a stand (in fact 1 always take one, based on a specific moral choice). So I did not go to these fourteen people with the detachment of the anatomist or the imperturbable reporter. I went with a thousand feelings of rage, a thousand questions that before assailing them were assailing me, and with the hope of understanding in what way, by being in power or opposing it, those people determine our destiny. For example: is history made by everyone or by a few? Does it depend on universal laws or on a few individuals and nothing else?

Oriana Fallaci (1929 – 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her interviews with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Her book Interview with History, contains candid, lengthy, penetrating interviews with Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Willy Brandt, Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and Henry Kissinger, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap during the Vietnam War. The interview with Kissinger was published in Playboy Magazine, 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." She also interviewed Deng Xiaoping, Lech Wałęsa, Muammar Gaddafi and many others.