Praise for Notes on a Foreign Country

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 of complicated historical processes and her detailed, evocative descriptions of places, people, and experiences most American audiences can’t imagine.

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 born into histories, into national myths and, if we are unfortunate enough, into the fantasies of an empire.

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 Americans are taught about their national and personal identities disallows the very acquisition of this knowledge.

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.

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.

Notes on a Foreign Country has gotten a good deal of attention, and deservedly so … She is disarmingly candid.

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.

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.

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.

Passionately argued … An insightful writer with remarkable powers of observation.

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.

Her memoir is a piercingly honest critique of the unexamined white American life.

Written with compassion and a deep thirst for justice, this book is a must for anyone struggling to make sense of the rapidly changing times we live in—one in which, as much our nation’s leaders continue to assert themselves, American hegemony is being ever more called into question.

Hansen’s sustained self-criticism indicts the white American system itself and, in the process, does the field of journalism a great service with her humility, introspection, and willingness to defy the establishment line.

This combination of historical and political analysis combined with Hansen’s musings about her own identity create a narrative that defies categorization. While it bears traces of memoir and of travel writing, her methodology also taps into ethnography and political theory.

It would be difficult for an American reader to not feel changed by this book.

… A compelling exhortation to introspection: Hansen urges Americans to recognize the perspectives that shape — and sometimes distort — how they understand their country’s role in the world … She vividly captures the disorientation we experience when our preconceived notions collide with uncomfortable discoveries … It is rare and refreshing for an observer to exhibit this level of candor about her internal tensions … Timely and urgent.

The innocuous title of Suzy Hansen’s “Notes on a Foreign Country” offers little sense of the eloquent and impassioned prose that lies within the book’s covers.

Notes on a Foreign Country is Hansen’s ardent, often lovely attempt to take self-awareness overseas … If Noam Chomsky could write like this, Hansen’s work would already be done.

Hansen turns a coming-of-age travelogue into a geopolitical memoir of sorts, without sacrificing personal urgency in the process . . . Her long stay in Istanbul (she’s still there) gives her an outsider’s vantage on myopic American arrogance that is bracing. And her fascinating insider’s view of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise upends Western simplicities . . .The experience is contagious.