Notes on a Foreign CountryNotes on a Foreign Country

In the wake of the September 2001 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. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West. 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 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.