by SuzyHansen (Author)
'A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world.' Hisham Matar, New York Times Book Review
In the wake of the 11th September attacks and the US-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 naive 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.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Publisher: Corsair
Published: 04 Jan 2018
ISBN 10: 1472153898
ISBN 13: 9781472153890
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 US (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 *