Notes on a Foreign Country

...[a] remarkably revealing book ... a deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world ... Notes on a Foreign Country is a sincere and intelligent act of self-questioning. It is a political and personal memoir that negotiates that vertiginous distance that exists between what America is and what it thinks of itself. That dramatic, dizzying and lonesome chasm is Hansen’s terrain ... Hansen is doing something both rare and necessary; she is tracing the ways in which we are all born into histories, into national myths and, if we are unfortunate enough, into the fantasies of an empire. She traces the ways in which 'Americans were in active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations.' She is interested in and does well to expose the machinery — the propaganda, the economic authoritarianism, the military might, the manipulative diplomacy, the myriad aid agencies and NGOs — that made this possible ... The tone is at once adamant and intimate. This is a book that is spoken softly rather than screamed; and one senses that it took great personal discipline to be so. In fact, what is admirable is the extent to which Hansen implicates herself. She does this soberly and without self-pity. She is, to herself, independent but by no means innocent ... The problem, however — and it is a problem to do with conversion — is that it is assumed that the question is one of persuasion. If only America were like Hansen: disquieted, self-analytic and imaginative. Perhaps, in other words, Americans know that they feel superior and are quite content with their superiority. Perhaps their naïveté, if that is what it is, is not as deep as Hansen imagines; perhaps they are aware of the myth of themselves and have simply decided it is too useful a myth to give up.

...a searching and searing book ... Hansen writes with both authority and humility and, occasionally, with sharp beauty ... Some of the book’s strongest passages involve her rigorous interrogation of the notion of American exceptionalism, of America as the pinnacle of a historical narrative of progress, which she realizes she has internalized ... Also fascinating is the author’s evolving understanding that despite her faith in her journalistic objectivity, the myths she has absorbed affect the way she tells stories from around the globe ... a testament to one journalist’s courage in digging deep within herself to understand the real story and to make sure she gets it right.

...a compelling exhortation to introspection ... She vividly captures the disorientation we experience when our preconceived notions collide with uncomfortable discoveries, likening that moment to 'a cavity filling: something drilled out, something shoved in, and afterward, a persistent, dull ache and a tooth that would never be the same' ... It is rare and refreshing for an observer to exhibit this level of candor about her internal tensions. But occasionally Hansen’s perceptions create tensions of their own. While she premises her book on the judgment that America is in decline, she also characterizes it as an empire ... and while Hansen rightly cautions against blind acceptance of America’s foreign policy, which has often departed from its self-professed values, blanket suspicion is not warranted, either. Her narrative would be more balanced if she acknowledged some of the contributions of U.S. power ... Still, with the U.S.-led postwar order under growing duress, and with long-standing U.S. allies increasingly questioning America’s reputation as the exemplar of openness and pluralism, Hansen’s principal injunction to Americans to understand how others view them and their country’s policies is timely and urgent.