Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award * Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book * Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive “A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world.” –Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book … country’s violent role in the world.” —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review
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, 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.
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Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country is a clear-eyed look at U.S. foreign policy (particularly in the Middle East) from the perspective of an expat American being enlightened about her country’s misdeeds while fulfilling a fellowship in Turkey.
Honestly, while I was initially shocked by Hansen’s naivete (which she acknowledges, and even refers to as ignorance, early and often, and which given that, when she departed for Istanbul she did so with an Ivy League education and several years of NYC work experience, only speaks to the larger issue of ignorance of international affairs in this country), she quickly gets to the heart of the matter in terms of the U.S.’s near-continuous and out-sized presence in the Middle East in the past 70-odd years. She builds the case that the U.S. has created an empire quietly and without the awareness of most Americans, and that, as she demonstrates time and time again, U.S. decisions directly impact the lives of those in other countries on a regular basis. (Case in point: today’s headlines regarding the assassination of an Iranian general by the U.S.).
Hansen explores U.S-Turkish relations most closely, as that is where she now lives and has the greatest experience and knowledge, but she does a more-than-passable job is exploring similar imbalances between the U.S. and Afghanistan, Greece, Pakistan, and Latin American countries. Think coups. Lots of coups. Vietnam. The School of the Americas. Cuba and the Philippines. Hansen catalogues them all here, the questionable and the clearly wrong.
Because of the nature of U.S. imperialism, as compared to the old European empires, Hansen builds the case that the U.S. empire is equally if not more insidious and damaging than those older empires, which were openly acknowledged, and whose ties, for better or for worse, were formalized. (Those who haven’t read it should follow Hansen’s work with James Bradley’s primer on the founding of the U.S. empire, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War or Julia Flynn Siler’s Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure.)
Notes on a Foreign Country is a timely reminder of the precarious power exercised by the U.S. It is an indictment of U.S. foreign policy from time immemorial, but it is also an indictment of the generalized ignorance that has allowed this policy to continue unabated.
4-and-a-half stars.
(This review was originally published at https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2020/01/notes-on-foreign-country-american.html)
Hard to get into it. Did not finish it.
Few Americans have little knowledge of how our Foreign Policy affects other countries. We are so sure that we have all the answers. We need more reporters to tell their stories of the effect of the US foreign policy on the lives of ordinary people in developing countries. SO often we back the wrong leaders.
It will probably change your perspective of America.
It did mine.
Painful but essential reading. As a member of the Vietnam generation I was not so naive as the author initially was about US involvement in the world. I learned a lot, though. I’m just not sure what to do with this new understanding. I heard Tulsi Gabbard in a recent interview and thought she got it about right. We should not be engaging in efforts to control other countries at enormous cost to ourselves and others, spending endless billions on the military instead of things like public health, education, infrastructure and the environment. And we don’t engage in these policies out of selflessness, as the myth would have it.
This could have been a wonderful book. Unfortunately the author is obsessed with race and racial discrimination. She brings all of her immature liberal baggage from her American childhood and garbages the book with this rather than the sights, sounds and history of this fascinating country. Much time is spent apologizing for the success and influence of America. I quit about one third of the way through.
This book isn’t just about Turkey. It’s about the United States and our way of being in the world — something most people haven’t considered in the way this author presents. Highly recommended.
Hansen describes how she had to cleanse herself of attitudes and outlooks that came with her growing up in the United States before she could begin to understand the lives and events of people in other cultures. Her focus is on Turkey and her pathway to objectivity was a difficulty journey which it has to be for any of us who care.