Book 47 of my 2019 Reading Challenge
read from June 29 - July 21
Notes on a Foreign Country:
An American Abroad in a Post-American World
by Suzy Hansen
Summary (via Goodreads)
published 2017
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, Iraq, 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.
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, Iraq, 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.
My Opinion
2 stars
This was a dense book that was tough to get through. It's not a 1 star because I save that rating for books that are so bad they made me angry; this one doesn't make me feel anything. My mind wandered as I read it.
Other than the access the author had to interview people over the span of time she lived there this felt more "info dump" non-fiction history book than "notes on her life in a foreign country". That could be very interesting for some but not what it was presented as so I was expecting more of a memoir/leisure read.
A Few Quotes from the Book
"If you are dealing with people who do not know how to read and know they don't know how to read it is at least conceivable that you could teach them to read...But I don't know what you do with the people who are ignorant in the way Americans are ignorant. Who believe they can read, and who read their Reader's Digest, Time magazine, the Daily News, who think that's reading, who think they know something about the world because they are told that they do." ~ James Baldwin
"The difference between us and them is that our country has created this universe in which sanctions are acceptable punishment for everyone except our country. It means no other country can force my father to lose his job, or force my family to go hungry, or to break up my family, or to forever distort my future, but my country can do that to almost any other foreigner, including the man sitting across from you at a cafe."
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