"A poignant and perceptive study of what it takes to heal." -- Publishers Weekly "My Hijacking is a historian's riveting account of having been, as a child, made an unwilling participant in a historic event. A skillful combination of memoir and history, Hodes's talents as a historian and writer are on full display in this beautifully written and deeply affecting work." -- Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Times bestselling author of On Juneteenth "In this singular and riveting book, Martha Hodes uses her considerable skills as a prize-winning historian to reconstruct her own experiences as a young girl aboard a hijacked plane in the Jordan desert in 1970. Taking multiple paths into the question of why she remembered so little of what she lived and felt during that traumatic event, Hodes has given us a moving and unforgettable meditation not just on history and memory, but also on family and the silences they guard." -- Ada Ferrer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuba: An American History "Martha Hodes is one of the best writers in the profession of American historians. In this book she transcends the art of history as she also practices it, crafting a memoir of gripping power and courage about her "voyage into forgetting and remembering". Hodes delivers something sacred - a heroic search to "unbury" a terrible piece of her own past in records, but especially in her disconnected memory.
She creates her own genre - a devotional narrative about the mystery of memory and truth, accomplished with humility and intrepid determination. [An] unforgettable book." -- David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom "Everything about this story is a surprise and it is told by one of the most fascinating, imaginative scholars now at work in American history." -- Darryl Pinckney, author of Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan "Revolutionary, revelatory, and deeply moving, My Hijacking starts where other memoirs stop--at the absolute limits of memory. A terrific work of suspense and a magnificent achievement that sets a new benchmark for the genre." -- Nell Zink, author of Avalon ".intriguing.
what gives her book its propulsive force [is] her effort not only to piece together the details of the hijacking and its aftermath, but to make sense of the omissions in her own memory.Hodes examines the episode with a historian's meticulousness and a reporter's zeal." -- New York Times "An extraordinary task . Hodes calls the book a 'personal history' rather than a memoir, and that is apt. If memoir brings the devices of fiction to the task of autobiography, then Hodes has brought the instruments and procedures of historical biography to her own personal narrative. [Hodes] demonstrates a keen and subtle eye." -- New Republic.