Oriana Fallaci, 77, who died today, brooked no compromises and took no prisoners. According to spokespeople for the private hospital in Florence where she met her end, the noted writer had been battling cancer for 10 years. Since September 11, 2001, Fallaci has been best known as a strident -- or some might say, rabid -- critic of Islam. But years before, she made her mark as one of the most extraordinary interviewers in journalism -- so extraordinary that in 2004, she interviewed herself about her own impending death.

To appreciate Fallaci at her best, pick up a copy of her vintage collection from the mid-1970s, Interview With History. There, you'll find the conversation that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called, “the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press.” Why? Among other reasons, Fallaci got Kissinger to agree that the Vietnam War had been "useless."

Fallaci also got former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to talk about her children -- a topic that she usually refused to discuss. The Shah of Iran told her that he'd had conversations with Allah as a child. Just after the 1979 Iranian revolution Fallaci asked the Ayatollah Khomeni, "How do you swim in a chador?"

In the preface to Interview With History, :

“Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. . . . I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”

But she was not always combative. She loved writing about astronauts, of all things, and when I was a journalism student, my professor said that when she got to interview the Apollo 11 astronauts about their landing on the moon, she asked the most brilliant and incisive question, "Are you scared?" I hope that story is true, because I learned volumes from it about how to be an interviewer -- that sometimes the simplest question is the wisest.

When Pete Conrad became the third man to walk on the moon, he joked about his small stature -- "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me" -- to prove that NASA didn't script their astronauts' comments. People were often tempted to try to prove themselves to Fallaci in those days, it seems.

By 2005, Fallaci's anti-Muslim writings got her indicted in Italy for "vilipendio" -- the vilification of a state-recognized religion. The case never came to trial. The former WWII-resistance fighter turned author and agitator was unrepentant. Reduced by illness to a liquid diet, she sipped champagne and declared to a Wall Street Journal writer,

"Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty."

In her 2004 interview with herself, which she granted, "Because death is on my back," Fallaci seemed to agree with those who had criticized her over the years for being mean-spirited toward her interview subjects.

"To be good, an interview has to stick itself into, sink into, the heart of the interviewee. ... In this I have always seen an act of violence, of cruelty."

For now at least, the "cruelty" that made Fallaci first an icon, and then a lightning rod for criticism, has ended. The world will not soon see her like again.