Books

A Hijacked Plane, a Childhood Trauma Long Repressed

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4 months ago

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June 5, 2023

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Press Room

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MY HIJACKING: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, by Martha Hodes

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, a new form of terrorism rattled the international order. Militants from a nascent Marxist-nationalist revolutionary movement called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine began to hijack passenger planes — repeatedly, all over the globe — in an attempt to bring about the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel and Europe.

Yet even during those years, when “hijackings were mere inconveniences,” as the historian Martha Hodes writes in her intriguing new book, one event stood out: the coordinated seizing, in September 1970, of four aircraft traveling internationally. (A fifth attempt, on an El Al plane, was foiled in midair by an armed guard.) It was, Hodes notes, the “most spectacular episode of air piracy the world had ever seen.”

She was 12 at the time. Her sister, Catherine, was 13. They were heading home to their father in New York after spending the summer with their mother in Tel Aviv. But shortly after their TWA flight flew over Brussels, Hodes saw a woman and man run down the aisle, he holding a gun and she a grenade. The couple commandeered the plane, diverting it to a remote airstrip in the Jordan desert. Thus began a six-day, six-night nightmare in which the plane’s passengers were held hostage aboard the unmoving plane, as their flight meals gradually dwindled to scraps, with no running water, no working toilets and dynamite wired inside the aircraft.

The story has all the makings of a real-life thriller. But soon Hodes encounters a narrative problem: She remembers very little about those days. The diary she kept at the time, rather than serving as an insightful guide, proves to be a “relic of erasure.” “I was adept at banishing disagreeable feelings,” she recalls. Of limited help are her fellow passengers, some of whom seemed more excited than alarmed by the incident. “Gee,” one wrote in a letter midflight. “We’re being hijacked!” Others broke into song, adjusting lyrics to fit the circumstances: “living on a jet plane …”

Like these other passengers, Hodes recalls that she did not feel frightened during her time in captivity. But years later, in the wake of 9/11, she finds that the world’s sudden fear of air travel corresponds with the one she has been carrying with her unacknowledged since she was a girl. This is what gives her book its propulsive force: 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.

In “My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering,” Hodes examines the episode with a historian’s meticulousness and a reporter’s zeal. She tracks down many of her fellow hostages, pores over TWA archives and press briefings, and resurfaces long-forgotten interviews that she and others had given. Still, despite providing an impressive play-by-play of the events as they unfolded — from a female captor’s announcement over the loudspeaker (“I am the new pilot”) to the flight attendants continuing their beverage service, free of charge this time (“standard policy during hijackings”) — she cannot make up for the emotional void at the center of her book.

Capturing no sense of imminent danger, and no genuine recollection of emotion, Hodes’s story remains at a frustrating remove. While reading it, I felt at times as though I was viewing the hijacking through the thick pane of an airplane cabin window. With too many unknowns, Hodes tends to rely on the unsatisfying vagueness of rhetorical questions: “What thoughts did I quell, then vanquish? Did I worry that the plane would crash?” She asks, but does not — cannot — answer.

Luckily, narrative aid comes from unexpected quarters. Some of the most compelling scenes in the book have nothing to do with the hijacking, but rather deal with the author’s family and unconventional upbringing. Both of her parents had been protégés of Martha Graham. They fell in love while dancing together at Graham’s company in the 1950s and wed soon after, but Hodes’s mother could not stay put. She wondered whether it was “abnormal” to spend her extra cash “on a leotard instead of a cookbook,” Hodes writes. After a five-week dance tour of Israel, and a second trip, to Tel Aviv, to help start a new Israeli dance company, she decided to move there. Though Jewish, she was drawn to Tel Aviv not out of ideological conviction or religious curiosity, but out of a sense of opportunity to break free of American domesticity.

“Away from her husband and children, my mother flourished,” Hodes writes without a hint of resentment. An arrangement was struck: Hodes and her sister would spend the school year with their father, living in a spacious, roach-infested apartment in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, and the summers with their mother in her tiny, seaside Tel Aviv apartment. (Once, when Hodes asked her father what class the family belonged to, he replied: “artist class.”)

Toward the end of the book, Hodes takes a reporting trip to Israel and Jordan to retrace the steps of her youth. But these chapters fall oddly flat, reading like an assortment of generic anecdotes. Yet it is in her quest to find out why she has forgotten so much that the book’s strength comes into focus. An astonishing reason for her lapses in memory, Hodes finds, has to do with her and her sister’s consumption of tranquilizers. She discovers testimony from International Red Cross doctors revealing that some hostages, including children, were subject to a “liberal distribution” of soporifics.

But she also lands on another reason for her forgetfulness that feels true to life. Like her father, who had waited anxiously in New York for days for word of his daughters’ condition, Hodes was highly selective about the memories she recounted to others about the hijacking over the years. These memories had solidified in her mind as the only narrative of the experience. “My aim was the same as my father’s,” she writes. “To craft stories we could live with.”

Ruth Margalit is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.

Books

Whatever Happened to Local Comedy Scenes?

Published

13 hours ago

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September 28, 2023

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Press Room

Paris in the 1920s. Hollywood in the ’70s. Chicago in the ’90s?

It’s long been my after-midnight-at-the-bar theory that when it comes to urban cultural vanguards, the Michael Jordan era belongs in the pantheon. Full disclosure: I was there and missed it all.

Despite living in Chicago when young improvisers like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert and Adam McKay were killing in front of live crowds, I never saw any perform. I don’t have a story of bumping into the legendary comedy teacher Del Close or catching Kanye West’s original rap group. I missed Liz Phair as well as the indie-rock renaissance pushed by labels like Drag City and Touch and Go Records.

Just when I thought the cultural obliviousness of my college years couldn’t be greater, a new book, “The Perfect Amount of Wrong: The Rise of Alt Comedy on Chicago’s North Side,” opens another avenue of regret. Its author, the comic Mike Bridenstine, makes a persuasive case that Chicago in the late ’90s and aughts was one of the great incubators of modern stand-up. Bridenstine was part of it, but his account, catnip for comedy nerds, benefits from detailed reporting, tracking the careers of, among others, Kumail Nanjiani, Kyle Kinane, Pete Holmes, Hannibal Buress, Beth Stelling and Cameron Esposito.

Packed with fabled stand-ups who never made it big and their intimate shows, his punchy chapters are perfect for those who argue about comedy the way Stephen A. Smith does about sports. Was the Lyon’s Den (where Holmes and Nanjiani started the same week) the greatest comedy open mic in history? Did T.J. Miller revolutionize crowd work? Does Matt Braunger deserve to be compared to Robin Williams and Will Ferrell? This book should start some fights.

But there’s also a challenging broader argument buried here, about the conditions that make for great art, one that hints at a pessimistic outlook about local scenes in the age of social media.

Chicago has long been known as a place for artists to get good, not famous. It’s far enough from the coasts to keep industry executives at bay. This has produced many eccentric artists and chips on shoulders. For stand-ups, the fact that it was renowned as an improv town was one chip; the second was that the only major club, Zanies, did not book many local acts.

“The best thing that ever happened to comedy in Chicago was Zanies saying you can’t perform here,” Bridenstine, 44, told me in a recent phone interview. Rejection fueled comics to start their own shows, presenting bills in restaurant back rooms, bars and scrappy festivals. The isolation of these shows, their lack of publicity, meant that crowds were locals not tourists, die-hards not casual fans. Originality mattered as much as killing. “There was pressure, in a really good way, to be different and weird,” the comic Brooke Van Poppelen says in the book.

This resulted in comics like the wry political observer Dwayne Kennedy, who inspired considerable awe and gushing among peers. “The fact Dwayne Kennedy is not a household name is insanity,” Sarah Silverman has said. One possible explanation might be found from a producer, who says that to book him, you needed to fax his dad.

An early provocateur, Bill O’Donnell was famous for incorporating vomiting into his act. There were guys with nicknames like Tommy Mayo, and others like Nick Vatterott, who refused to do the same joke twice in a week and performed a bit as a ventriloquist’s dummy that required him to sit inside a box for two hours. He delivered a hilarious set on “The Tonight Show” years ago that hinged on him pretending to forget a joke. “Nick Vatterott is my evidence that comedy is not a meritocracy,” Bridenstine said. “I don’t know anybody funnier than him. And I know a lot of people more famous and successful.”

Along with stories of the famous and forgotten, the book leans on the journalism of Allan Johnson, a critic for The Chicago Tribune who died at 46 in 2006. He was an early champion of Bernie Mac, probably the greatest comic to emerge from Chicago that decade and the book’s most glaring omission. (In the 1990s, comedy was more segregated than today, and there is scant coverage here of predominantly Black rooms.) The attention Johnson lavished on local shows, in praise and criticism, was an important spotlight, drawing audiences and creating conversation. His coverage is also an integral source for this book. Considering the depleted state of newspapers, in Chicago and elsewhere, one wonders about the local comedy coverage future authors will draw upon.

The more significant contrast with comedy today is the minor role of the internet. It’s not merely that there wasn’t the push to turn your jokes into videos. Comics were less aware of their peers in other cities in the 1990s, and thus there wasn’t the same anxiety of influence. One Chicago comic, John Roy, describes the sense of wanting to embrace alt comedy on the coasts, but only vaguely knowing about it from reading about Patton Oswalt or seeing Janeane Garofalo on HBO. “We’re trying to reverse engineer this idea of alternative comedy from a couple articles in Rolling Stone and a special,” Roy says in the book. “You don’t really know what it is. But you subsequently get a lot of creativity because people start going: ‘Well, I got to be weird.’”

The internet — with social media and sites like YouTube — diminished the distance between scenes and put all comics in the same digital room. This has advantages. Comedy is bigger than ever, and it’s easier to find quality jokes. Bridenstine argued that while there are more good stand-up shows in Chicago today, the scene isn’t producing “Kinanes, Kumails, Beths or Hannibals.”

Is this merely nostalgia? Perhaps a bit, but it’s fair to ask a troubling question: Is the internet killing off distinct local comedy scenes?

There is a long history of cities producing their own comedic aesthetics. Boston is blustery and blue collar (think Bill Burr), while San Francisco is wild and experimental (see Robin Williams). Washington, D.C., and Portland, Ore., have their own styles, too. These are all simplifications, but they matter. When everyone can see everyone else online, parallel thinking in jokes increases, and comics move to New York and Los Angeles quickly after viral fame, making coherent local identities harder to maintain.

Who you are around as a young artist is tremendously important. Now we are all, to some degree, around the same people. To be sure, “you had to be there” is a real thing, especially with live comedy, and the internet is full of niches where subcultures can flourish, but whether they will be closely associated with cities is an open question.

Bridenstine sounded skeptical. “City scenes don’t exist in isolation like they used to,” he said, adding a note of optimism while tossing one more chip on his shoulder. “I think new styles will evolve and people will decide to be new and different whenever this current way of arena rock comedy gets old.”

Books

The Most Novelistic Part That Patrick Stewart Ever Played

Published

14 hours ago

on

September 28, 2023

By

Press Room

“I acted Macbeth for exactly 365 days,” says the actor, whose new memoir is “Making It So.” “The role got into me so deeply it dominated my life at the time and caused me to drink too much alcohol after the performance was over. No other role I have played has affected me so profoundly.”

Books

18 New Books Coming in October

Published

15 hours ago

on

September 28, 2023

By

Press Room

Thrall first recounted the story of Abed Salama’s search for his 5-year-old son after a bus crash on the outskirts of Jerusalem in a 2021 piece for The New York Review of Books. Now he’s expanded it, weaving the wrenching human saga with a history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Metropolitan Books, Oct. 3

Bohannon presents nothing less than a new history of the species by examining human evolution through the lens of womankind. It’s a provocative corrective that will answer dozens of questions you’ve always had — and even more you never thought to ask.

Knopf, Oct. 3

When the cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed in 2022, the journalist Michael Lewis had been spending time with its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, in order to write a book. Now his intimate look at the now-disgraced entrepreneur is scheduled to be published around the time that his trial on fraud charges is set to begin.

Norton, Oct. 3

This return to the horror-soaked setting of “The Haunting of Hill House” — which was greenlit by Shirley Jackson’s estate — features a group of friends who make the mistake of renting the moldering old mansion.

Mulholland Books, Oct. 3

Sinclair, an award-winning Jamaican poet (“Cannibal”) recounts her coming-of-age in a strict Rastafarian community in Montego Bay and the rebellion that grew within her, until she escaped — through education and through language.

37 Ink, Oct. 3

After years as a journeyman stage actor, Stewart found himself an unlikely celebrity in his 40s after being cast as Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” His memoir vividly recounts the tribulations he overcame — a provincial upbringing, an embittered father — and the teachers and mentors who pointed him skyward.

Gallery, Oct. 3

The Maniac, by Benjamín Labatut

In his new novel, Labatut chronicles the life and legacy of John von Neumann, the polymath who worked on the Manhattan Project and made pivotal contributions to physics, economics, computing and other fields. It’s a study of scientific genius and the darkness of a hyper-rational mind, told through imagined remembrances by colleagues, associates and loved ones.

Monica, by Daniel Clowes

Clowes’s latest graphic novel tells the story of a woman’s life from birth to old age and her long quest to track down, or at least understand, her mother. Progressing from the 1960s to the present day, the genre-bending episodes in this book draw upon counterculture, women’s empowerment, apocalypse and the supernatural, among other themes.

Fantagraphics, Oct. 3

A master of intimate, psychologically precise narratives featuring ordinary people caught in extreme circumstances, Garner, now 80, has amassed a devoted following in her native Australia. With the republication of “The Children’s Bach,” a novel about a loosely connected group of 1970s Melbourne residents sorting out their lives, and “This House of Grief,” a nonfiction account of a wrenching murder trial, she is sure to attract new fans here.

Pantheon, Oct. 10

What is there to say about Madonna Louise Ciccone that she hasn’t said herself, in song and video, on talk shows and TikTok, through provocative pronouncements and a book called “Sex”? Over 800 pages, Gabriel, an indefatigable biographer who has also tackled Karl Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen, provides an answer.

Little, Brown, Oct. 10

More than three decades after “The Firm” rocketed onto best-seller lists and made him a household name, Grisham revisits the novel’s indelible main characters, Mitch and Abby McDeere.

Doubleday, Oct. 17

Reid, an executive editor at Foreign Affairs, traces the life and death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo, who was in office only a few months before he was deposed and assassinated in 1961. As he plumbs recently declassified files, Reid sheds light on the C.I.A.’s role in the killing.

Knopf, Oct. 17

Tremor, by Teju Cole

A Nigerian-born photography professor at a New England college narrates this novel about art and power, finding much to ponder — on colonialism, subjectivity, identity — in the everyday details of teaching, travel and working. Around him is a world not of idyllic pleasures but of latent violence and instability.

Random House, Oct. 17

Ward, the two-time National Book Award-winning novelist, conjures the horrors of antebellum slavery through the story of Annis, who is forced on a harrowing march from a plantation in North Carolina to the slave markets of New Orleans — a journey overseen by spirits and steeped in allusions to Dante’s “Inferno.”

Scribner, Oct. 24

“I never lost sight of what the character gave me,” Winkler, the star of “Happy Days,” writes in a showbiz memoir flavored with gratitude — for a life-changing audition, a long marriage, a sideline writing kids’ books and a second stab at TV acclaim in HBO’s “Barry.”

Celadon, Oct. 31

In her revelatory memoir, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champion exposes the pain and humiliation she’s endured at the hands of the international body governing athletics and the international public, who have challenged her identity as a woman — and as the fastest woman in the world.

Norton, Oct. 31

History meets horror in Due’s latest novel, about a Black boy in 1950s Florida, Robbie, who gets sent to a brutal reformatory school after defending his sister from a racist attack. But it’s not just the warden Robbie needs to watch out for — this school is also haunted by the ghosts of students who died there.

Saga Press, Oct. 31