Publishers Weekly
Lucid, reflective, probing, and poetic, Hansen’s book is also a searing critique of the ugly depths of American ignorance, made more dangerous because the declining U.S. imperial system coincides with decay at home. The book is a revelatory indictment of American policy both domestic and foreign, made gripping by Hansen’s confident . . . distillation […]
The New York Times Book Review
Her book is a deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world … ‘Notes on a Foreign Country’ is a sincere and intelligent act of self-questioning … Hansen is doing something both rare and necessary; she is tracing the ways in which we are all […]
Booklist
Hansen’s must-read book makes the argument that Americans, specifically white Americans, are decades overdue in examining and accepting their country’s imperial identity … [Her] argument goes beyond the factual assertion that Americans are ignorant of the country’s long, complicated, invasive histories with many other countries around the world. She makes the paradigm-breaking claim that what […]
Financial Times
A fluid amalgam of memoir, journalism and political critique — and a very readable challenge to American exceptionalism. Americans’ sense of their innocence, argues Hansen, renders them incapable not only of a sense of tragedy, but of love.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Commonweal
Notes on a Foreign Country has gotten a good deal of attention, and deservedly so … She is disarmingly candid.
Basharat Peer
It is rare to come across an American writer who has moved through the world―especially the Islamic world―with the acute self-awareness and thoughtfulness of Suzy Hansen. She has 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.
The Progressive
Extraordinary … This is a beautiful, angry, sad piece of writing that every American should read as we try to live in a world that has long known things about us that we are only now coming to understand.
Michelle Goldberg
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.
The New York Review of Books
Passionately argued … An insightful writer with remarkable powers of observation.