"The Rage and the Pride" is the book about, and in reaction to, Sept. 11 by the heroic journalist Oriana Fallaci. In it, she has written a blistering critique of European political correctness and of Islamofascism. Fallaci broke a decades-long silence to write this book. The bulk of the manuscript was typed in a white heat, just weeks after the massacre in America. It has earned her almost daily death threats.

In her native Italy, "The Rage and the Pride" sold one million copies in seven months (in a country of fewer than 60 million). The French translation of the book has been a number-one bestseller since its publication in May -- despite a lawsuit by a Muslim group that sought to block it or to slap a warning label on it, like a pack of cigarettes.

Yet it has only been published in America now, more than a year later. Having read it, I understand why the American publication comes as something of an afterthought. Most of this book is not written for us, though it says passionately and magnificently many of the things many Americans feel.

Her picture is one you will recognize if you've read Western thinkers who spoke up after Sept. 11 -- Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, V.S. Naipaul -- and decried the Islamist assault on the liberal values of Western civilization: freedom, equality, toleration. They reminded fellow critics of Western culture that the bulk of it is worth fighting for.

Fallaci, even more than the others, writes from the gut, with a furious energy that the book's title barely contains. Her prose takes you right back to the writing that was done in the immediate wake of the slaughter, when the stench still hung over New York City and firefighters picked through "a brown mud that seems like ground coffee but in reality is organic matter: the remains of the bodies in a flash disintegrated, incinerated."

It is a style that is characteristic and cannot be duplicated at any distance from the event. From her home in Manhattan, she watched the towers fall _ "The first one collapsed because it imploded, it swallowed itself up. The second one because it melted, liquefied, as if it really was a stick of butter." Like many of us, she then watched, on TV, the Palestinian celebration of the massacre. And she heard the news that many in Europe were saying the U.S. got what it deserved.

That, she says, was the trigger. "Ideas that for years I had imprisoned inside my heart and my brain," sure that no one would listen to them, "gushed out of me like a waterfall."

Fallaci is no armchair observer of the Muslim world; she has traveled extensively in it and interviewed everyone from Khomeini to Arafat. She had seen into the rotten hearts of the people who plotted these attacks. And she knew what she wanted to say about them.

But her main targets are the breed of European intellectuals she contemptuously calls "cicadas." She assails the crypto-Marxists who were so fond of the line about religion being the opiate of the masses only when it applied to the benign modern Christian churches of their own lands. She likewise confronts the feminists who couldn't spare a word on behalf of brutalized, enslaved, mutilated Muslim women.

And she mocks the liberals of Europe who treat all the Muslim emigrants flooding their lands as "poor little things." And to the bin Ladens and their admirers, she is unsparingly blunt. She envisions the Muslim fanatics coming after the artwork of her beloved Florence, as they did to the Bamiyan Buddhas or the World Trade Center:

"And should the poor-little-things destroy one of those treasures, only one, I swear: it is I who would become a holy-warrior. It is I who would become a murderer. So listen to me, you followers of a God who preaches an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I was born in the war. I grew up in the war. About war I know a lot and believe me: I have more balls than your kamikazes who find the courage to die only when dying means killing thousands of people. Babies included. War you wanted, war you want? Good."

The English translation for this work was done by the author. Her prose is straighforward, vigorous English, yet it is sprinkled with the quirks of one who speaks English as a second tongue. Writing about how, in her imagination, she still can see the Bamiyan Buddhas (the ones the Taliban dynamited): "I see them because about them I know all what I should." Yet even these grammatical lapses -- writing English as though it were Italian _ make "The Rage and the Pride" seem all the more vivid and furious.

America is not the crowning glory of Western culture, as some flag-waving bigots would have it. Neither is it a cancerous growth, as some Europeans say. Far from driving a wedge between the continents, Fallaci reminds us how much we share, and revere in common.