Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen
Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

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Overview

Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan AwardFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction

New York Times Book Review
Notable BookNamed 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 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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374280048
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 08/15/2017
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1 First Time Ease: Turkey 29

2 Finding Engin: Turkey 69

3 A Cold War Mind: America and the World 108

4 Benevolent Interventions: Greece and Turkey 132

5 Money and Military Coups: The Arab World and Turkey 161

6 Little Americas: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey 190

7 American Dreams: America, Iran, and Turkey 215

Epilogue 239

Notes 249

Acknowledgements 261

Index 265

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