Fearless Women, Powerful Stories: Author Mimi Nichter
Erica Baas
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Hostage
A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience
On September 6, 1970, twenty-year-old Mimi Nichter boarded a flight home to New York from Israel. Hours later, armed members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had hijacked her plane and forced it down in the Jordanian desert.
Hostage
Passengers aboard Trans World Airlines Flight 741 were held on board for six days in sweltering heat without flushable toilets or running water. Most were eventually sent home.
Mimi, however, was accused of being an Israeli soldier and held with thirty-one other hostages in Amman, where they feared for their lives as a violent civil war erupted around them.
In Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience, Mimi recounts her survival of the hijacking of TWA Flight 741—an event that became one of the most significant episodes in aviation history and an early defining moment of international terrorism.
Told with courage and empathy, Hostage explores not only what happened in those terrifying days, but how trauma can shape a life long after the immediate danger has passed.
Terror. Silence. Healing.
Learning to Live With What Happened
After her dramatic release, Mimi returned to college a different person. Plagued by terrifying memories, she kept her experience largely silent.
One year later, determined to live in the present, she backpacked across Africa and Asia with her boyfriend and began to find a path forward. Yet the trauma she had buried resurfaced each time another global hostage crisis appeared in the news.
Mimi ultimately realized that fully healing required her to explore how the hijacking—and her decades of silence about it—had shaped her life. Hostage is a powerful examination of how strength and humanity can flourish even in the most fearful and untenable circumstances.
An Award-Winning Memoir
Mimi Nichter
Mimi Nichter is an award-winning cultural anthropologist, public speaker, and professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, HuffPost, Brevity Blog, and Career Authors.
Her memoir, Hostage, was a finalist for the Literary Award in Nonfiction at the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books and has received both the 2026 Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir/Overcoming Adversity and a Literary Titan Gold Book Award for Nonfiction.
A moving story of survival, silence, memory, and the courage required to reclaim one's own story.
