Publisher's Weekly Review
After moving to Turkey in 2007, American journalist Hansen, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, came to the startling realization that America seen from abroad is a wholly different entity from the America she knew. Hansen explores her own loss of innocence, as her belief in American grandiosity, exceptionalism, and humanitarianism is deeply shaken by the destruction wrought by the U.S. in the Middle East. The first chapters describe Hansen's encounters with Turkish nationalism and her painful acquaintance with a new view of her country's history. Subsequent chapters explore the ways American interventions have spread wars, propped up dictators, destroyed landscapes in the name of modernization, and spurred the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle and Near East. 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-if overreaching-distillation of complicated historical processes and her detailed, evocative descriptions of places, people, and experiences most American audiences can't imagine. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Americans are taught that they are exceptional, brave, and fearless. 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. In 2007, journalist Hansen won a fellowship to live abroad and chose Turkey because American author James Baldwin wrote he felt more like himself, a gay, black man living in the 1960s, in Istanbul than New York. How could that be? Hansen's 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. When a mine collapses in the Turkish city Soma and she asks for the cause, she's stunned that people want to talk about American foreign policy from the 1950s. Only after years of living in Turkey can Hansen frame interview questions with an awareness of her American biases. Hansen builds her winning argument by combining personal examination and observation with geopolitical history lessons. She is a fearless patriot, and this is a book for the brave.--Dziuban, Emily Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, by Suzy Hansen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) Over her years living in Istanbul, Hansen, a journalist, became keenly aware of America's enduring influence in the Middle East - and, as she put it, Americans' "active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations." This pointed memoir reconciles her personal idea of the United States with its political realities. THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE, by Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Picador, $16.) This high-minded detective novel is a semiotic romp. Binet treats the death of the critic Roland Barthes as a possible murder with political undertones. Heaps of real-life figures crop up along the way, including Julia Kristeva, François Mitterrand and Michel Foucault. The sendups of academia are frequent and gleeful. THANKS, OBAMA: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, by David Litt. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Litt joined the Obama campaign as a volunteer, eventually rising to become a senior speechwriter for the president. This optimistic account centers on Litt's coming-of-age at the White House (in a job where "every audience is the entire United States"), and assesses the president's legacy along with the political processes that shaped it. BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, by Attica Locke. (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $15.99.) In East Texas a ranger goes searching for the killer of a black man and white woman, whose bodies were fished out of a bayou. As he rushes to solve the crime, secrets, betrayals and racial tensions across generations threaten to erupt. Our columnist Marilyn Stasio listed the book as one of the best crime novels of 2017, and wrote, "Locke writes in a blues-infused idiom that lends a strain of melancholy and a sense of loss to her lyrical style." BUNK: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, by Kevin Young. (Graywolf, $18.) This timely history delves into America's enduring fascination with the apocryphal, touching on everything from P.T. Barnum to fabricated memoirs. Our reviewer, Jonathan Lethem, called the book "a panorama, a rumination and a polemic at once," which "delivers riches in return." THE UNDERGROUND RIVER, by Martha Conway. (Touchstone, $16.) In the 1800s, a young seamstress is abandoned by her sister, and is taken in by a traveling theater company based on a flatboat. Soon, she becomes involved in the dangerous work of ferrying children born into slavery across the Ohio River. This novel follows along as she evades slave catchers and other perils, and offers a host of quirky characters.
Kirkus Review
A journalist questions the notion of American exceptionalism.When New York Times Magazine contributing writer Hansen arrived in Turkey in 2007 on a research fellowship, she harbored a deep faith in America's "inherent goodness, as well as in my country's Western way of living, and perhaps in my own inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as well." She assumed that any nation's move toward modernity "in the American sense" meant progress. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, where international geography had been cut from the school curriculum, she knew little about the world; even as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she hardly noticed international events. Living in a "zone of miraculous neutrality" about her country's role in foreign affairs, she naively and complacently believed America to have "uniquely benevolent intentions toward the peoples of the world." That view changed dramatically as she traveled through the Middle East, reading history and political analysis and conducting many interviews in Turkey, Afghanistan, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. She discovered that fear of "communism, Islamism, or any other enemyism of the United States" led America to foster military dictatorships rather than risk the outcomes of democratic elections. Talking with Egyptian dissidents and Muslim Brothers, for example, Hansen learned of the corruption, torture, and repression resulting from American efforts to undermine Egypt with the aim of gaining power in the Arab world. She concludes that keeping Americans unaware about global issues has served such efforts, unleashed hatred abroad, and contributed to the rise of Donald Trump. Examining her own identity as an observer and writer forms a recurring theme: was she endorsing America's penchant for denial if she wrote about a foreign country without fully understanding its history, including America's role? Hansen offers a heartfelt plea for empathy and a recognition of "the realities of millions of people," but honing a sophisticated global perspective seems far more complicated than she acknowledges here. A mostly illuminating literary debut that shows how Americans' ignorance about the world has made turmoil and terrorism possible. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Journalist Hansen moved to Istanbul in 2007 after receiving a writing fellowship, an experience that challenges her conceptions of America and its role in the world. Despite her Ivy League education, she finds she knows little about international relations or Middle Eastern history. Always believing in America's unselfish goodness and exceptionalism, she is saddened and disillusioned to hear of the negative effects of U.S. empire-building after World War II. Through her interviews and extensive research, she learns that white privilege and Western-style modernization have contributed to government destabilization and the rise of the religious right in such nations as Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Having lived in Turkey for several years gives Hansen a unique perspective on the rise of Erdogan. A thorough, courageous, and thoughtful writer, Hansen probes her own prejudices in this coming-of-age memoir and urges Americans to become better informed about the world and try to see America from a broader perspective. VERDICT Though some readers will not appreciate Hansen's revelations, this important book should be read by all thinking Americans who wonder why so many around the world hate this country. ["A unique work that will find its place among a dedicated audience": LJ 6/15/17 review of the Farrar hc.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
