Word: fallacy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...interview started as a trial of strength, as interviews by the volatile Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci inevitably must. Lech Walesa, the Polish union leader, said: "I am a man with a goal to reach so I don't give a damn ... Not for the books, not for the interviews, not for the Nobel Prize and even less for you." Fallaci answers: "Listen, Walesa ... if you don't mind, I am the one who asks. Now let's start." Soon Walesa confesses that "I'm tired, bloody tired, and not only in my body...
Without the distracting presence of cameras, Fallaci stress-tests the people she interviews. Her method makes most interviews on American television seem tepid. Only William F. Buckley Jr., with the practiced assurance of a Catholic debater, similarly confronts his subjects as an equal in discourse (and sometimes barely conceals his suspicion that he is the intellectual superior). Bill Moyers is apt to be overrespectful, perhaps because he often interviews people he admires. Mike Wallace so single-mindedly bears in on someone's vulnerability that he rarely shows the person in the round...
...Oriana Fallaci...
Fifty years ago, Critic D.B. Wyndham Lewis compiled an anthology of hilariously (and unintentionally) bad verse entitled The Stuffed Owl. Today an enterprising editor could produce a companion Owl stuffed with bad prose. High on the list should be selections from Oriana Fallaci's nonfiction novel A Man. The title is the last instance of unmannered writing to be encountered until the reader emerges at the other end, covered with tropes...
...Fallaci has shown strengths as the grand inquisitor of such disparate leaders as Henry Kissinger and the Ayatullah Khomeini. Here she assumes her customary tone of moral outrage, but the hero, a deceased Greek revolutionary, is as unpromising in death as he was thwarted in life. The owlish collector of excesses is soon faced with an embarrassment of riches-and sometimes just with an embarrassment. For connoisseurs of melodrama there is the first meeting of narrator and martyr: "You were to have many faces, many names ... you were a Vietcong girl... You told me about a god with a yellow...