Suzy Hansen

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.… (meer)