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An American Abroad in a Post-American World
by Suzy Hansen
Suzy Hansen left her country and moved to Istanbul and discovered America.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.
Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country - and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, "a broken heart ... A one-hundred-year-old relationship."
Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America's place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation - a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.
"Starred Review. The book is a revelatory indictment of American policy both domestic and foreign, made gripping by Hansen's confident - if overreaching - distillation of complicated historical processes and her detailed, evocative descriptions of places, people, and experiences most American audiences can't imagine." - Publishers Weekly
"This personal memoir of cultural exploration teaches us how to see the world in greater context." - Library Journal
"Hansen offers a heartfelt plea for empathy and a recognition of "the realities of millions of people," but honing a sophisticated global perspective seems far more complicated than she acknowledges here. A mostly illuminating literary debut that shows how Americans' ignorance about the world has made turmoil and terrorism possible." - Kirkus
"To be an American is of itself, George Santayana once wrote, a moral condition and education. Notes on a Foreign Country embraces this fate with a unique blend of passionate honesty, coruscating insight, and tenderness. A book of extraordinary power, it achieves something very rare: it opens up new ways of thinking and feeling." - Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger
"[Suzy Hansen] deftly blended memoir, reportage, and history to produce a book of great beauty and intellectual rigor. Everybody interested in America and the Middle East must read it." - Basharat Peer, author of A Question of Order
"Notes On a Foreign Country is at once a kaleidoscopic look at modern Turkey, a meditation on American identity in an age of American decline, and a gripping intellectual bildungsroman. I'm in awe of this wise, coruscating book." - Michelle Goldberg, author of The Goddess Pose
"It's really quite simple: if you have any interest at all in how the non-Western world views America and Americans, you must read Suzy Hansen's beautifully composed memoir Notes on a Foreign Country. And when America's leaders complain - while campaigning and in office - that there is "great hatred" for the U.S. (and that they want to get to the bottom of it), it should be required reading by government officials - all the way to the Oval Office." - Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
This information about Notes on a Foreign Country was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Suzy Hansen is contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and has written for many other publications. In 2007, she was awarded a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs to do research in Turkey. She currently lives in Istanbul. Notes on a Foreign Country is her first book.
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