“…[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.”
–Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review, August 28, 2017
