My Hijacking

By Martha Hodes,

Book cover of My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering

Book description

In this moving and thought-provoking memoir, a historian offers a personal look at the fallibilities of memory and the lingering impact of trauma as she goes back fifty years to tell the story of being a passenger on an airliner hijacked in 1970.

On September 6, 1970, twelve-year-old Martha Hodes…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked My Hijacking as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’m a historian who loves therapy! I think the most interesting discoveries we make in life are about ourselves. I love the process of shining a light into our subconscious minds to discover the roots of how we think, feel, and act. I find inner child work especially exciting. 

So when I heard that one of my favorite historians, Martha Hodes, had broken with academic tradition and published a personal history weaving together memory, family, trauma, and childhood to figure out “what really happened” to herself decades ago, I ran to pick up a copy from my local bookstore, and…

This was another incredible book in which a historian looked back at her childhood and focused on one specific traumatic event from her past, the time she and her sister were on a plane that was hijacked en route from Tel Aviv to New York City.

Hodes not only used her skills as a researcher to recreate the events of the hijacking in mesmerizing detail, she also movingly revealed the personal traumas she endured during and after the ordeal, especially as she came to realize how much she had suppressed the event in her own consciousness.  

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