Suzy Hansen
Best non-fiction book on international affairs
AWARD DATE: 2017
AWARD NAME: 14 The Cornelius Ryan Award
AWARD RECIPIENT: Suzy Hansen
AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
AWARD HONORED WORK: Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World
AWARD SPONSOR: Friends of Richard Threlkeld
American journalist Suzy Hansen moved to Istanbul to better understand the Muslim world. Her highly insightful and engaging book weaves her own background—white, small-town America, elite college—with an awakening on why the U.S. is often hated overseas amid decades of American intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere. She takes aim in particular at how the abiding myth of “American exceptionalism” has blinded American policymakers, journalists and citizens to an often sordid reality. Hansen has produced a sweeping and powerful corrective to the way
most Americans view U.S. foreign policy of the past 70 years.
Citation Recipient: Joshua Kurlantzick
Affiliation: Simon & Schuster
Honored Work: A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA