The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story

Do you remember the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988? I do; I was home from college for the holidays, and I recall feeling particularly sad for the college students on that flight who never made it to their own homes. Author Ken Dornstein's older brother, David, was on that flight, another young man (just 25 at the time) simply trying to go back home. As a result of David's death, Ken, six years younger and still in college himself, is cast adrift. He tries to make some sense of what has happened from the voluminous writings that David, an aspiring author, has left behind; this becomes a never-ending endeavor which serves to delay rather than facilitate Ken's grieving for his brother, and Ken's entire life becomes consumed by what he calls "The Dave Oral History Project." In publishing this book, Ken finally succeeds in telling the tale of David's life, although I found Ken's account of his own journey to be much more compelling. As a reader, I had little patience or sympathy for David, whose purported talent as a writer never really comes through in the snippets from his journals, letters, and stories which are included here. In addition, I sometimes felt as if I had to slog through the parts of the book in which Ken was recounting David's often chaotic experiences. Whenever Ken turned to his own life, however, I was fascinated. Though he rarely makes specific mention of his grief, Ken nevertheless provides a candid, unaffected portrayal of the confusion, bewilderment, and uncertainty which can accompany so profound a loss. Furthermore, Ken offers the reader an insider's view of how the effects of David's death ripple and reverberate throughout his entire life, from his lack of career direction to his struggles with love and marriage. Ultimately, this book is not a story about either the Lockerbie tragedy itself or even David Dornstein, one of its victims (although the reader will learn quite a bit about both); rather, it is a simple tale of one man's struggle to deal with his own private grief in the face of a public loss. This is a poignant, thoughtful work which I recommend highly.

As one of many people who thought they knew David Dornstein in his college years, I now realize, after reading this painful, funny, honest and wise book by his younger brother, that David was even more complicated than he seemed. We knew David as a gifted writer, a witty newspaper columnist, a colorful eccentric, someone whose burning ambition was to be a great artist, and who showed genuine, frequent sparks of brilliance. We admired the way he cleverly mocked authority and conformity, and how he went through life with passion and intensity, refusing to compromise. Most of us had no clue that David's gifts also had a dark side, that he was often making himself miserable by setting impossibly high standards for himself, or that he suffered from what probably was clinical depression, or that he was wrestling with the lingering after-effects of boyhood traumas that included a mentally ill mother, his parents' divorce and sexual abuse by a man in David's hometown. Now Ken Dornstein has written an unflinching memoir that that lays bare the whole history, filling out a complex portrait of his unique big brother, whom he, and many others, took turns adoring. Ken eloquently describes his joyful years under David's tutelage, as well as the long painful years after David's death during which Ken suffered from survivor's guilt, and tried without much success to conquer his grief. It took Ken many years to figure out how to get on with his own life, and to give himself the right to be happy with his wife K, whose former identity as David's college-era girlfriend is fascinating, but ultimately incidental to the new and separate relationship that K and Ken built together. In the act of writing this book, Ken has exorcised (we hope) his own demons, which have haunted him ever since David's life was cut short suddenly and horrifically by that suitcase bomb high in the night sky above Scotland. But whether or not writing this chronicle of two brothers' lives and loves enables Ken to finally subdue his grief, we his readers hope that he at least realizes that he has accomplished several other things. Ken has finally made it clear to the world that David Dornstein was a truly soulful artist - whose life was itself a work of art -- regardless of whether David was ever destined to have his books make it onto the New York Times bestseller list. Ken also has created a work of great literary merit, thereby becoming the artist whom David always hoped to become. However, somewhere David is not envious of Ken at all. Rather, David is surely beaming, and taking as much credit as possible for his little brother's triumph, bragging to anyone who will listen: "Don't you think we look alike?"

to have a brother like Ken. This is a moving tribute to his brother, a beautiful, charismatic, fragile soul who died in a tragic yet almost poetic way. The author shares details of his and David's life in a way that allows this to be both a memoir and an autobiography of at least a time in the author's life. Rarely does one think that possibly someone who died so young might have been better served as they were not really equipped for the mundane that accompanies life after your 20s. But the portrait painted here by the author makes me think that beautiful david dornstein lived as he was supposed to and died as he believed he would. great book.

I read "The Boy who Fell" in one sitting, mesmerized by this generous, candid rendering of the years the author spent making sense of the life and death of his brother David. While the putative subject of the book is 'the boy,' by far the richest reflections herein are those of the author moving from boy to man, and how very willing he is to share his tangled processes of grief and growth. Arguably Ken retains a bit of little brother's wide-eyed wonder as he looks at David; the reader sees a madness in David - likely inherited from their mother - but the author never entertains the notion that his big brother was seriously ill. In true writer's craft, Ken 'shows' rather than 'tells' of David's alternating periods of mania and melancholy, grandiosity and despair. I am left wondering, however: does Ken 'know'?

David was a classmate of mine at Brown, someone I wish I'd gotten to know better. As good a writer as he was (and he was brilliant), I think Ken is an even better writer. And I think that somewhere, David is thrilled to know that. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a beautiful, evocative and excrutiatingly painful read; I can't recommend it highly enough.