Will I love My Hijacking?

A riveting account of a formative experience. Astounding.

This book made a historical event personal, reminding me that all big events are experienced by individuals.

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… show more.

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.