Hostage:

A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience

The hijacked planes were flown to the desert near Zarqa in Jordan. After six days on the planes, the passengers were removed, and the planes were blown up.

At the age of twenty, while traveling home from a summer in Israel, Mimi Nichter was a passenger on one of three airplanes that was hijacked and brought to a deserted airstrip in Jordan. This 1970 hijacking marked the beginning of international terrorism and was the first extended hostage situation in aviation history. The hijackers, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were a relatively unknown group. Forced to remain on the plane for six days in the desert, Mimi was interrogated at gunpoint and accused of being an Israeli soldier. While most passengers were sent home, Mimi was kept along with thirty other hostages and held in Amman during a chaotic civil war. Fearful and disoriented from the ordeal, she returned home three weeks later to a world from which she now felt estranged.

Aspiring to move away from the trauma of being a hostage, Mimi rarely talked about the experience. Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience follows her life as she becomes a world traveler, a cultural anthropologist, a wife and mother, and finally to her understanding that in order to heal she must tell her story. This riveting and suspenseful memoir offers an intimate window into a harrowing journey and an unusual path to recovery.

An article on her hostage experience appeared in Newsweek.com.

A Filtered Life

Social Media on a College Campus

A Filtered Life is the first ethnographic account of how college students create and manage multiple identities on social media.

Drawing on interviews and data from popular social media platforms, the authors document practices that are typically operating behind the scenes. They introduce the concept of “digital multiples,” and describe how students strategically present themselves differently across social media platforms.

Taylor and Nichter examine key contradictions that students discussed, including presenting a self that is both authentic and highly edited, appearing upbeat even during emotionally difficult times, and being body positive even when frustrated with how you look. Students struggled with this series of impossibilities but felt compelled to maintain a vibrant online presence.

More Books by Mimi Nichter