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

No doubt my rating is skewed by reading this in Istanbul, where I can see proof of Hansen's assertions about the effects of American imperialism all around me. She uses James Baldwin's astute, pellucid writing to establish a paradigm about American "innocence," the willed blindness that allows US ci......more

I read part of this book on a U.S. military base, half an hour before the opening of a USO center. Her words were still in my mind as the keynote speaker brought up the North Korean threat, the Marshall plan, the importance of American military might in sustaining peace in the Pacific and the suppor......more

The author is an empty receptacle receiving the ideas of the Turks with no intellectual scrutiny, no historical exegesis and inadequate consideration of the legacy of Communism. According to her, the US is a doe eyed imbecile bull in a China shop. I find it ironic that in this self-flagellating rant......more

"This is hard for many people in the West to understand," I said. "I think they cannot understand Turkey," he said. "First of all, Turkey's a narcissistic society. One way we think we are the best, the other way we are very fragile. We can easily believe that we are humiliated. Yet we also have arro......more

A decent book, and I definitely learned things from it. I know more about Turkey and about Kabul than before I read it, and I'm grateful to it for that. But it can be frustrating, too. A lot of Hansen's book is about how troubling it can be to travel to a country without knowing it's history. That's......more