On a recent afternoon, the telephone rang in Oriana Fallaci's Manhattan townhouse. The tiny, blue-eyed 72-year-old writer put down her cigarette and picked up the receiver. "Oh, it is you!" she said. She assured the caller she was all right, then thanked him and hung up. "He calls to see if I'm alive," she said, "to see if I need something." The caller was a police officer, who has been checking in on Ms. Fallaci since the publication of her most recent book, The Rage and the Pride, which she wrote in New York during the weeks following Sept. 11....