Suzy HansenRecensioni

A naive journalist is sent to Turkey and the questions that her interviewees ask her make her realize that everyone knows a lot about Americans, but Americans lack the knowledge of other people's histories, even when Americans changed and molded it... in Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and many other places.

This book, of course, is not actually a homage to a foreign country. It is about America. It is about Americans. It is obsessed with America's position in the world, and with Americans' toxic naïveté about it.

And if only this was actually a book about Turkey! Hansen presents the story almost as a semi-coming-of-age narrative, where the veil lifts from her eyes and her American delusions of superiority vanish as soon as she learns all the awful Cold War / Neoliberal crap we pulled in the last century. She admits her surprise not only at America's monstrous manipulation of global politics, but also at how saturated the rest of the world is with American economics and culture and physical objects.

But how could any of this be shocking to anyone? Of course Americans are divorced from the actual "boots on the ground". We ship black and Latino soldiers thousands of miles away to fight our needless wars for us while miring ourselves further in our home front capitalist nightmare. We have no clue about what other people and countries and cultures are experiencing -- or at least the vast majority of us don't. And it's really fucked up!

So, yes. I realize now that the reason this book started dragging in the middle is because, by that point, the author had already polished off her most interesting insights -- e.g., the parallel of populations around the world dispossessed by American empire to the alienated American underclass that voted for a populist autocrat -- and left the journalist-takes-on-Istanbul memoir part to dive into what high school students should have learned in their 10th grade history class.

The way Suzy Hansen writes about her discovery of Turkey and specifically Istanbul is truly mesmerizing. She is not ashamed to admit that she didn't know anything about her new home country. Put this together with the vivid descriptions of a failed American foreign policy regarding the Islamic world, and the only conclusion is that this is one of the best works of non fiction you can read.

Expansive and specific, readable with flourishes of startling beauty and insight, an honest investigation of Turkey, Greece, the Arab world, and of being an American.

Pretty good. She goes from an American writer who knows nothing to a complete anti-AMERICAN.
The reason that this book rates so high is that I have been to Turkey six or seven times since 1986.
My friends there are white Turks -she a classmate of my wife who recently moved to Ankara
from Istanbul -( too crowded) and was a journalist for many years, and he a retired pipeline engineer.
They both believe the CIA is responsible for everything that goes wrong in turkey, while we believe that tne
CIA are pedigreed idiots.. what does our brave reporter think we should have done when saddam invaded kuwait

Profound, thoughtful, provoking and satisfying. Highly recommended. If you want to challenge the way you think and view the world - this is a great read.½

For most of this book, the foreign country in question is Turkey, but Ms. Hansen's real subject is America -- specifically, America abroad. And that's America -- not Americans. Ms. Hansen's book is a process of discovering the existence and extent of the American empire abroad, the damage that it has done to many societies and individuals, and the impact that this has had on foreign views of America. Americans themselves, all too often, do not see an American empire, but instead a country trying to do good to others. Ms. Hansen's book follow her own journey from innocence, through learning a lot about the last seventy five years, to an anguished awareness. This makes the book far more powerful than a purely objective analysis might be. The book is well written. One negative note: in some instances I think Ms. Hansen overestimates the sheer lust for power of the American government, and underestimates the reality of the challenges it faced abroad -- in particular during the Cold War. One positive note: having spent a lot of time in Turkey, I appreciate Ms. Hansen's love for that sometimes difficult place, and the perspicacity of her analysis. Because of the negative note, I thought about four stars, but the positive one made me move it back to five. APM

Not a bad book, she has become an anti-American writer , from a naive person. The fact that it rates as high as it does reflects the fact that i have visited Turkey often, most recently two years ago. My wife's college roommateis a white Turk, a journalist, had a husband who was a pipeline engineer, and moved out of Istanbul to Ankara because it got too crowded. They blame everything on the CIA. We thought they were wrong. Now, I have come to the same conclusion that the author did, but It took many years.
Also, the US is not to blame for everything. what was Pres Bush todo when Saddam invaded Kuwait? JH½

An impressive and thought-provoking book by a young journalist who finds that her carefree decision to head for Turkey as a way to understand the Muslim world via the most "Westernized" (and thus acceptable) Muslim nation in the Middle East leads her in some very unexpected directions -- including questioning her own identity. Which is the "foreign country" in the title of this book? It's hard to tell: Hansen tells the reader plenty about Turkey and its complex history (and the history of its relationship with the US) as well as about Egypt, but her long sojurn overseas causes her to look back on the US itself in much the same way that non-Americans might do -- as if it, to her, weren't her homeland but indeed just another foreign country.

Hansen is challenging our assumptions about how we think about, discuss, report on, analyze and judge what happens abroad through our own prism, and reminding us that we necessarily have our own biases that come into play in this process. Sometimes, there are questions she fails to ask or address, as when she deplores LBJ's insensitivity to both Greek and Turkish political leaders when he was trying to avert a war over Cyprus (the still-divided island off the coast of Turkey with a substantial Greek population.) LBJ's decision was straightforward: fight, and I'll yank your funding, and Greek democracy (and Turkish independent rule) will have to rely on its own resources. Hansen is scathing about this arrogance -- but however tactless the approach, would she have preferred a war, so that the Greeks and Turks could maintain their national pride and honor and not be disrespected? Or ... a third way? She doesn't extend her analysis that far. Equally, she deplores the US-supported torture of the shah's SAVAK secret police in Iran -- but fails to mention that today's Iranian regime appears to be just as adept at torture and repression, without the aid of the US, even though it also has built regional medical centers that meet the healthcare needs of its citizens better than we can do here. That's a problem that Iranians themselves protest about, as we saw during the "Green" elections. Finally, Hansen clearly believes that Americans don't understand their world, and that may indeed be true for a large portion of the population. Why? How do we alter that? (And why is it that some Americans have no problem identifying Mossadegh when asked?) We can afford to be incurious -- that's her point -- but why is it that some people do investigate the world, travel, and become knowledgeable, while others (like Hansen, it seems) have this knowledge and questioning forced upon them? So, this is a merit-worthy look at what's wrong with Americans and their myopia, but she tips a bit too far sometimes in the direction of patting herself on the back for being "woke'. At some point, it's an individual responsibility to learn, and simply deploring the state of affairs isn't enough. This is a fundamental weakness in what otherwise is a provocative and interesting book.

Those who are well-informed about the region (Egypt, Turkey, Greece, etc.) will find very little that's new, beyond Hansen's personal explorations, discoveries and anecdotes. That doesn't mean this isn't worth reading, as she does have a keen eye for the interesting and quirky as well as for the telling detail. The underlying thesis was provocative enough to warrant a five-star rating, but the book itself gets only 4.3 stars, given the aforementioned shortcomings.½

This is an important book but from my perspective it is flawed by several things, especially the omission of reference to any of the efforts by US journalists, academics and others to awaken the public, as Hansen was awakened by living and reporting on Turkey. Although she cites many authors to excellent effect, she seems unaware of the work Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, or Lederer and Burdick's "The Ugly American." All of these people and others addressed her theme of American ignorance of the nations we try to shape in our image. Similarly, Hansen also ignores the steady stream of domestic dissidence with the worldview and foreign policies she rightly finds offensive, from Vietnam through to the present day. Perhaps understandably, someone who has loved in Turkey since 2007 is unaware of the work of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and other organizations and individuals trying to alert Americans to the deeds done in our name. Come to think of it, in the run up to the second Iraq War, an organization was born to oppose invasion of Iraq that called itself "Not In Our Name".

Despite those omissions, Hansen's book is useful for two reasons: it is a worthy effort to wake up the American public about what is being done in our name abroad and how it affects both Americans and non-Americans and it gave this baby boomer, who has in a small way been trying to communicate about these same situations for several decades, insight into the worldview and mindset of people born in the 80s and 90s.

Wow, this is one of the best books on American foreign policy I have ever had the chance to read. Hansen's perspective is most certainly shaped by her years living abroad in Turkey and living within a more moderate Islamic society. I think my favourite chapter is her thoughts on the poorer areas of Mississippi as compared to Turkey. Outstanding. This might very well be my favourite book of 2017.

A meditation on American identity. Based on print reviews, I thought I would find this book interesting, but, instead, found it a poorly composed book. Portions of the book were previously published in a number of magazines and it appears little editing was done while combining these articles into a book. Several "amusing anecdotes" were repeated. I imagine it would have been a more understandable read if the articles were published as such with appropriate chapter headings. Why would a person who states "the impact of seeing foreign things with my own eyes was the equivalent of reading a thousand history books" think they even needed to write a book? Or, better yet, why would one read a book based on personal anecdotes where the author exclaims "in my ten years abroad, I wonder how often it was that anyone told White Americans the truth?"?

I love the idea of seeing America from an outside lens and was looking forward to exploring this book. However, the book itself is disjointed, sort of several things at once: a memoir, a lesson in Turkish political history, a literary review of illustrative texts and, finally, a look at how a select few foreigners viewed White Americans in the years following 9/11. For me, the book would have worked better focusing on just one or two of these elements and I was bogged down with so much happening at once.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks!