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

Pulitzer Prize Finalist: "Hansen's principal injunction to Americans to understand how others view them and their country's policies is timely and urgent." —The Washington Post Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award A New York Times Notable Book Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive

In the wake of the September 11 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.

She arrived 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.

"Her fascinating insider's view of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rise upends Western simplicities." —The Atlantic

"Vividly captures the disorientation we experience when our preconceived notions collide with uncomfortable discoveries . . . Rare and refreshing." —The Washington Post

"A deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —The New York Times Book Review

"A fluid amalgam of memoir, journalism and political critique—and a very readable challenge to American exceptionalism." —The Financial Times

© 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9780374712440

Release date

Ebook: 2 July 2024