What the Critics Are Saying

”The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky” is not just the memoir of a brother’s loss or even the autobiography of a life cut short. It’s more like a full-scale attempt at resurrection, or at least a part of such an effort, the same larger effort that the book itself chronicles. For the fullness of the attempt goes so much further than mere biography. The author made saving David — if not from death, then at least from disappearing into the forgetfulness of the living — first into a job and then into something like a life…

If the goal was to rescue David in some way, at least from the quicksand of time, then in this at least his younger brother can take comfort in having succeeded magnificently….Brilliant, handsome, restless, irresistible to women (and sometimes to men), alternately charismatic and crazed, David was in some ways the ideal older brother. His aspirations for himself were boundless but frustrated, and soon enough, as if sensing what was coming, he transferred them to Ken, to whom he wrote with heartbreaking candor of his affection: ”You are beautiful and your nature is a narcotic to me, my time is not ever so blissful and rich and fulfilling as when I am in contact with you. . . . I have absolute trust and belief in you. Just keep growing.”

By the time you finish it, this is a hugely satisfying book. David’s letters and diaries add psychological horsepower and tragic heft at every turn, and his faith in his brother’s talents is redeemed as well. Ken is a talented writer who is sensitive to the literary and cultural context of everything he sees and feels (including his attraction to his dead brother’s lovers). His journey into the heart of David, moreover, reveals not just truths about the Dornstein brothers but about love, loss, and ultimately life’s inescapable transience.
–Daniel Akst, Boston Globe

Creating narrative coherence out of awful accident is, I suppose, a textbook way of dealing with grief…[but] it’s Dornstein’s skill as a writer that makes the raw material [of David’s life] seem tailor-made for the form he has chosen…It’s not just the notes his brother left, the half-finished stories and abandoned novels and instructions to literary executors, or the letter to David from his father that explains and explores the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Ken ends up married to David’s college girlfriend, but before they get there the two of them have to work out, slowly and painfully, whether there’s any more to their relationship than a shared loss. And David wanted Ken to become the writer he feared he would never be, so the very existence of The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky provides another layer of complication. It’s a compelling, sad, thoughtful book, and I’m glad i picked it up.
–Nick Hornby, The Believer

Books about pain and suffering, as epitomised by the Dave Pelzer industry, are hard currency, but this book is in another league entirely. What makes it so, for a start, is its complexity…The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is accomplished in so many ways: part thriller; part elegy; part biography; part meditation on grief. The technicalities of the story – the crash, the trial of the Libyans 10 years later – are handled with a reporter’s precision. But more than anything else, Dornstein is a wonderful writer. His brother David wanted to be a great writer. He died too soon for us to know if he ever would have been.
–Louise Carpenter, Daily Telegraph (London)

Among the 259 passengers on Pan Am Flight 103, blown to bits over Scotland in 1988, was a young writer named David Dornstein. He fell to earth in the yard of a Lockerbie resident named Ella Ramsden. He had carried with him, according to one newspaper report, the manuscript of a brilliant novel eagerly awaited by an American publisher. Its pages were now scattered across the Scottish countryside or the North Sea, lost, like its author, forever. The real story, painstakingly pieced together by David’s brother, Ken, is even sadder. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a mesmerizing tale of family crisis, mental illness and unfulfilled promise…

Ken Dornstein, who once worked on insurance-fraud cases for a small detective agency, is a diligent investigator. He travels to Lockerbie and searches for clues and traces. He interviews his brother’s friends near and far. After two Libyan intelligence agents are put on trial for the Pan Am bombing, he flies to the Netherlands in 2001 to witness the verdict….The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is polished to a high gloss, with every transition perfectly in place. A cool narrator, like Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby,” Mr. Dornstein records emotionally wrenching events but keeps his distance… In a writing class with Robert Coover, David Dornstein wrote the first draft of a work he thought might be his ticket to immortality. It would be a fictional autobiography, the story of an unknown young writer who dies in a plane crash, leaving behind a cache of papers and notebooks that the narrator stitches together into the story of the writer’s life. Someone else, it turns out, lived to write that book.
–William Grimes, New York Times

Given the timing of its publication and that it’s a memoir, many readers of “The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky” may try to compare its author, Ken Dornstein, to two other writers recently in the news: James Frey and Joan Didion. Addressing the first comparison, it’s absurd that both Dornstein and Frey are labeled memoirists. Frey obviously wasn’t interested in telling the truth about himself, but rather in creating a personal mythology. Dornstein, on the other hand, is writing against mythology, against sensationalism, in order to seek the truth about his brother, David, who, in 1988 at the age of 25, was killed along with 258 other unfortunate souls in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. And Dornstein is seeking the truth about himself. Nineteen at the time of David’s death, he spent the next 15 years struggling with the twin and opposing desires to embody and escape his brother. Writing this book was his way out of that tug-of-war.

To speak to the second comparison, the fact that Dornstein is writing so many years after David’s death makes his book a richer and more nuanced portrait of grief than Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” lauded as it is. It’s only as time passes and the pain softens that what was complicated about the relationship between survivor and deceased emerges. And it’s in teasing out those complications that we learn something about what it is to be human, something beyond the fact that the pain of losing someone you love seems unbearable…In seeking to understand, as well as tell, the past, Dornstein employs the full power and grace of the genre of memoir. The effect is extraordinary.
–Laura Wexler, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Reading a memoir is often like sharing an excruciatingly long cup of herbal tea with a particularly dopey stranger who has a life-affirming story to tell. But there is little solace to be found in Ken Dornstein’s investigation into his older brother David’s life and horrifying death aboard Pan Am flight 103 in 1988. In fact, I can’t remember a single passage in THE BOY WHO FELL OUT OF THE SKY that traffics in empty sentimentality or easy cliche. The series editor for PBS’s Frontline, Dornstein has written a memoir that reads with the unflinching factual intimacy of a coroner’s report. Want to know how a bomb goes about its gruesome business of ripping apart an airplane? So does Dornstein. He pursues the answers to these questions with a grim determination that is both uncomfortably obsessive and entirely fascinating. Then, once he’s satisfied with the terms of his brother’s death, he turns his eye to his life. And here, too, he doesn’t pull any punches. What emerges is far from hagiography – more portrait of the artist as a young f***up. Boy wants to write. Boy’s ambitions are greater than his talents. Boy is sensitive, thoughtful, petty, petulant. What we get is a particularly compelling account of a 25-year-old man’s life. In this case, a 25-year-old who was seriously confused about the usual topics–love, work, family. Probably not a whole lot different than you were at 25. That is, until he wasn’t. In his exploration of this most universal bummer of a life interrupted, Dornstein has written a book that transcends its subject, becoming a meditation upon not only his brother’s life but his own. All of ours.
–Esquire “Big Book of the Month”

Yes, Dornstein’s book is a memoir. It’s about reckoning with the loss of his older brother David, who, at age 25, was on Pan Am Flight 103, bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Yet it avoids all the stereotypes of the genre: no self-pity, no prose that veers either into grandiloquence or single-word sentences, no tidy pronouncements about a messed-up life. Dornstein (PBS series editor, Frontline ; Accidentally, On Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America ) gives us the tale of his journey to learn more about a brother whom he thought he’d have a full lifetime to encounter. His book shows how, in seeking to make that encounter endure in spite of David’s death, he newly encounters himself. In deceptively straightforward prose, he weaves a subtle story, filled with self-deprecating humor and replete with wisdom. His book is loving, honest, and moving precisely because there is never a heavy hand at play. In fact, Dornstein’s approach is the perfect counterpoint to the declamatory style of his brother’s life. David had been avid, beyond all else, to be a published writer, and Ken quotes liberally from the many notebooks he left behind. David’s death denied fulfillment of his ambition, but through Ken’s book, the loss is not complete. Highly recommended.
–Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal

This is not a book to be read twice: It hurts too much, and it’s not to be forgotten.. Dornstein makes his brother into a character whom we feel we’ve already, always known…Whether or not David was a great artist, he was a devastating confessor of love, a love so presciently conveyed that one is left, even secondhand and decades later, dumbfounded… Even had David lived, there couldn’t have been a more knowing biography….
–Carla Blumenkranz, Village Voice

I’ve no idea how tough you have to be to write a book like this, and how tender as well. You also have to be consummately clever. Ken Dornstein knows, and subtly never lets us forget, that as well as dealing with a real person he knew and loved, he is also dealing with text, narrative, concealment, ambiguity, literary expectation… Don’t be fooled by the “true story” part, for this is that frequently sighted cetacean, “the Great American Novel”, or at least sketches for it, disguised as a family memoir.”
–Brian Morton, Sunday Herald (UK)

With the recent unmasking of some high-profile memoirists as frauds, so-called true stories have lately been taking quite a bit of heat. At the heart of some of the most contentious debates is the question of whether the presence of emotional truth in a memoir is enough to make up for a lack of actual fact and, by extension, whether veracity is a necessary casualty of creativity in nonfiction. Fortunately, we do not have to make this distinction with Ken Dornstein’s The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story. Dornstein’s memoir, weighted with both verifiable fact and emotional authenticity, allows us to shift focus from whether or not he is telling the truth to how well he conveys it…

Dornstein’s memoir is always compelling and frequently stunning, as in his hauntingly described visit to Lockerbie. And while it lacks the redemptive bells and whistles of many other true stories, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a quiet but powerful affirmation of life.
–Debra Ginsberg San Diego Union-Tribune

Ken Dornstein’s investigation of his brother David’s life and death is a considerable, multifaceted achievement. Essentially the story of the two brothers and their relationship, both actual and posthumous, the book starts on the night of David’s death in the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, aged 25. It then works, with delicacy, pathos and humour, both forwards and backwards to explore the grieving process and the life lost.

[The book’s] quietly optimistic ending hints at a new beginning which frequently seems impossible, as setback follows crisis in Ken’s wayward, utterly absorbing journey towards internal peace and a life of his own. It’s rare for a memoir to demand such intense emotional involvement from the reader, and rarer still for it to be so amply rewarded.
–Gabriel Tate, Time Out (London) “Book of the Week”

Two things make this a gripping read. First, David’s extraordinary personality. Fixated on becoming a great writer, he studied creative writing at university, and wrote day and night, cramming hundreds of notebooks with original ideas. A ball of energy, well-read, goodlooking and a great talker, he would pick up a woman on a train by passing her the start of a story and asking her to help him write the rest. But another Dave emerges too, as much in love with the idea of being a famous writer as with writing itself. The second page-turning element is Ken’s magnificent obsession, an allconsuming desire to resurrect David by inhabiting his brother’s life, a 16-yearlong marathon quest through everything he wrote, everyone he knew, that peaks in him tracking down David’s former girlfriend, Kathryn – like his brother, six years older than himself – falling in love with her and eventually marrying her….Having spent his brief life dreaming of literary fame, David finally achieved it, posthumously, as the subject, not the writer, of a book. He would surely have been pleased by the book – exciting, astonishing, moving, profound; he’d have loved being in it.
–John Harding, Daily Mail “Critic’s Choice” (London)

This is a remarkable book on many levels, not least for Ken Dornstein’s dogged honesty and winsome personality. It can be harrowing… By its conclusion, however, he has created something unusual and unforgettable: a heartfelt but unsentimental honouring of his brother that takes this brutal waste of life and reworks it into a sensitive and uplifting meditation on living.
–Rosemary Goring, The Herald (Glasgow)

What an expressive range Dornstein has! Humour, absurdity, bathos, drama, tragedy, excitement ? he combines them all in this shocking, complex and profoundly thoughtful study of loss and survival. Anyone wanting an insight into ambivalence and emotional repair and how to write a good memoir should read this book.
–Alexander Masters, author of Stuart: A Life Backwards

For those skeptical of memoirs after the James Frey flap, here’s a reason to give the genre another shot: Ken Dornstein’s The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky…Dornstein skillfully weaves David’s writings with his own memories of his brother, highlighting the differences and parallels between the two and creating vivid portraits of each. The prose flows beautifully, and while it deals with a heavy subject, Dornstein is subtly funny, telling stories about the things he and his brother did to entertain each other. These stories are not frivolous. Every aspect of the book is deliberate and moves the story of Dornstein’s journey along, taking you through the various phases of his grief…At some point through the telling of his story, Dornstein can finally let go. You feel thankful the journey is over, but honored to have been a part of it and to have witnessed David’s writing and Dornstein, as an author, take flight.
–Courtney Finn, Las Vegas Weekly

One cannot help but compare this story with Joan Didion’s recent “The Year of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the illness of their daughter. Like Didion, Dornstein tries to make sense of senseless loss and transform pain into art. He sifts through his dead brother’s tremendous output of journals and letters, and he is overwhelmed by the impossibility of bringing that lost brother back to life….Like Didion, Dornstein meditates upon and attempts to put into order all manner of lists, facts, procedures, receipts, dates, letters and transcripts. He generates his own lists and facts in the process, like things to do with two weeks of spare time waiting for requested official materials while visiting Lockerbie, or what David carried in his suitcase on Flight 103. Dornstein believes that if he could just assemble all the facts, perhaps some hidden truth could be found…This memoir begs another comparison. Dornstein, a journalist and series editor of PBS’ “Frontline,” straddles the line between objective reporting and subjective memory, the public and personal aspects of a tragedy that is both private and frontline news. Journalist Mikal Gilmore had to dance this fine line, too, in his memoir, “Shot in the Heart”…. In the end, this book stands on its own… Dornstein imitates his dead brother, parallels Didion and Gilmore, but somehow, in the process, Dornstein has proven he has his own style, his own memoir, his own writer’s life, and, much to our surprise and his, his own life.
–Brian Bouldrey, Chicago Tribune

Entertainment Weekly’s 2006 Preview

As the author pores through his brother’s books and letters, the grief, though subtly rendered, is palpable. By the time Dornstein chooses to write “The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky,” the reader is rooting for him to finish the book his brother never could. Through this process, Dornstein manages to marry K (though not without some panic), father a child and settle into a life of his own. Without an ounce of self-pity or melodrama, he writes with razor-sharp clarity and realizes, as we do, how the chapters themselves are a testament to the enormous love between these two brothers. By the sheer act of writing this “true story,” Dornstein is finally able to “close a loop that David had wanted closed” — and, ultimately, find his own redemption.
–Marian Fontana, Washington Post

After David died, Ken was left with an archive of fragments. He began a long, careful process of piecing together that resulted in this chiseled documentary. Along the way he finds a kind of satisfaction that David’s dysfunction never permitted him. He becomes the writer his brother couldn?t. (He’s now series editor at PBS’s Frontline.) And in a slightly uncomfortable turn of events, he falls in love with and marries David?s college sweetheart. If all of this seems alarmingly vulnerable to Freudian interpretation, don’t think that Dornstein isn’t aware of that. His memoir is an elegy, a love letter, but also a necessarily mechanistic performance of what Freud called “the work of grief” ? “the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”
–Dana Kletter, The Phoenix (Boston)

When 25-year-old David Dornstein boarded Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, he was thought to be carrying the genius debut novel he had toiled over for years. Then a bomb destroyed the plane over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. David’s younger brother, Ken (now an editor at Frontline), soon dedicated himself to completing that book from thousands of left-behind notebook pages. What emerges here is half an account of Ken’s life-halting obsession with reconstructing his mythical older brother and half the biography that David always expected as a soon-to-be-famous author. The thing is, the excerpts of David’s work that Ken quotes suggest that he wasn’t likely to make it as a great writer. Even so, Dornstein’s portrait is riveting for that very reason: It reveals the all-too-common flip side of the archetypal American success story. A-
–Gilbert Cruz, Entertainment Weekly

Ken Dornstein was a college sophomore in 1988 when his 25-year-old brother David was killed aboard Pan Am Flight 103. In his grief-stricken memoir, ‘The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky : A True Story’, Dornstein examines his charismatic brother’s brief life, from the women he dated, to his bouts of depression, to the stacks of notebooks where the aspiring writer poured out his troubled soul. In his quest to chase his brother’s ghost he pays a haunting visit to Lockerbie, researches the details of what his brother physically went through as his plane ripped apart, and even dates his brother’s college girlfriend (whom he later marries). It’s an up-close examination of grief and moving on with life, with echoes of Dave Eggers’s momumental ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Vintage)’ and the rawness of Joan Didion’s mournful ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’.
–Amazon.com Editor’s Pick: Nonfiction

Dornstein is too skilled a writer (and storyteller) to circle the important moments for us, or wallow in self-pity. His tone is frequently detached, even as he reveals one intimate detail after another about his own life without pausing to consider the buried emotions controlling his behavior. His skill is also evident in the vivid, brilliant manner in which he resurrects his brother. David Dornstein is presented as an endlessly compelling person, a writer of tremendous energy (if not focus) and an older brother unafraid to heap praise and love upon his younger brother… All this is presented so skillfully that one can forget, at least for a few pages at a time, that David Dornstein is dead. This book isn’t easy reading, and it’s not for those looking for neat resolutions, but Dornstein has written an unflinching graceful portrait of grief and the hope that comes after it.
–Matt Eagan, Hartford Courant

The Boy Who Fell From the Sky is Dornstein’s attempt to make sense of the nonsensical and is a raw, almost painfully honest account of an obsession that came close to ruining his ability to lead a life of his own, free from his brother’s instructions from beyond the grave. It’s a compelling read, surprisingly unsentimental and a satisfying mix of the personal and the factual. Dornstein’s description of the chronology of the explosion and the plane breaking up in mid-air is impossible to put down. And it’s no hagiography of David Dornstein, whose own words paint him as somewhat self-obsessed and often ego-maniacal in his belief in himself as a writer. This was despite the fact that his writings were limited to an ever-growing pile of scrawlings and unfinished stories. A unique and fascinating book that is part memoir, part autobiography and part anatomy of a crime.
–Claire Sutherland, Herald Sun (Australia)

The story of Ken’s quest begins with a near-pitch-perfect chapter devoted to a trip he made to Lockerbie eight years after the bombing. While the small town has largely moved on, the Scots are nevertheless respectful, solicitous; a crash investigator who befriends Ken shows him where his brother’s body was found, in the yard of a woman named Ella Ramsden….No David Dornstein novel, great or otherwise, was ever found. What emerges instead from this exhaustive investigation is a portrait of a funny, troubled guy with manic tendencies, who died too young. As this sometimes powerful, sometimes revelatory, sometimes tedious memoir rolls on, a heartbreaking irony emerges: it is Ken, not David, who is the true writer in the family. Also, the levir; in 2002 his and Kathryn’s son was born, giving the Dornsteins’ sad tale the happy, if bittersweet, ending it deserves.
–Karen Karbo, Newsday

…The memoir will be lumped with the first wave of Sept 11 literature, though Pan Am Flight 103 fell 13 years before the Twin Towers did. It deserves to be read on its own considerable merits… Ken’s clear-eyed and unsentimental account of how he stopped his fall just short of impact is a remarkable story. It leaves the reader astonished and grateful that Pan Am Flight 103 didn’t take one more soul down with it.”
–James F. Sweeney, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

[The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky] is a story that is all the more sad and gripping for its author’s almost impassive approach to its telling, and for his refusal to wallow or romanticize…The portrait that emerges is of a typical college bohemian who had embraced all the usual romantic myths about the writing life, yet could never quite master the focus or discipline necessary to complete anything. Although Ken’s original intent was to somehow save his brother from obscurity and wrest something coherent and redeeming out of the reams of papers he left behind, he ultimately–and wisely–never makes any claims regarding David’s work or its literary merits…. He succeeds precisely because he eschews melodrama and oversimplification in favor of a fairly straight, modest, and often conflicted recounting. He does his brother justice and learns, finally, to let him go. In the process, he discovers himself.
–Brad Zellar, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Reading The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a discomforting, often creepy experience. In part, it’s the story of David Dornstein, 25, a wanderer and passionate writer who was a victim of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 22, 1988. But it’s also the story of his younger brother Ken, who was 19 and at their father’s house in Pennsylvania when that plane fell on Lockerbie, Scotland. After the crash, Ken was haunted by the intense letters that David–a mythic presence to the younger Dornstein–had sent him, and he appointed himself keeper of his brother’s flame. During the ensuing 15-year struggle to piece together David’s story, Ken pored over David’s manic journal entries, which presented a frenzied, often sad, soul. (Convinced he was destined for fame, he had “prepared his ‘literary estate’ for posterity,” Ken writes.) In the end, Ken even married David’s college girlfriend. At times, this memoir feels like Ken’s therapy: If he can just get the story down, he’ll be able to have a life of his own. Still, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky offers a moving glimpse at the lengths it sometimes takes to make peace with the past. (Three stars out of four.)
–Allison Lynn, People Magazine

Although never published, David Dornstein wanted to write fiction and pursued his dream compulsively. But, as the title suggests, he never understood the cost to achieve, leaving everything he started partially undone. After David’s death, Ken Dornstein searches for the work that will validate his brother’s short, troubled life within the dozens of boxes David used to store his melodramatic love letters, angst-ridden journal entries, thinly veiled autobiographical fiction…Dornstein does something bold, and he does it publicly. In writing the book his brother could never write and loving the woman his brother never won, his success only makes David’s life all the more tragic. As a brother, such an act may seem contemptible, but for an author, it’s truly stunning.
–Emily Schmall, Miami Herald

When Ken Dornstein was a college sophomore, his adored older brother, David, was killed in the terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Though they were six years apart, they had been very close, a relationship maintained by David’s obsessive letter- and journal-writing. Those same journals and letters allow Ken to travel between the past and present to examine their relationship. David’s notebooks chronicle a profoundly personal struggle to find a place for himself while imagining an eventual fame based on his early tragic death and his writing talent. In college, David tried to convey a sense of his life to grade-school Ken, a life that Ken did not understand was unraveling. David struggled with depression, trying to distinguish between the madness of creativity and the pedestrian mental illness he may have inherited from their mother. Later, when Ken was the college student and David a young man unable to stabilize, Ken was more challenging and less adoring. After his brother’s death, Ken falls into relationships with two of David’s ex-girlfriends, evoking enormous biblical and psychological implications. Ken also unearths secrets in David’s life that had been hidden in plain view all their lives but left unexplored until David’s death. Dornstein’s account of his relationship with his brother and of his own self-examination is a startlingly honest, completely absorbing look at loss and brotherly love.
–Booklist (starred review)

This memoir cobbles together the author’s memories, past news accounts and David’s passionate journal entries and letters. It is this comprehensive blending as well as Frontline series editor Dornstein’s clear and eloquent writing about understanding the mystery of who his brother really was that keeps this from being a sappy, self-indulgent account. Dornstein employs some clever literary devices, such as a list of things to do in Lockerbie, which includes a walk to Tundergarth, one of the wreckage sites, with ‘hills so lush, soft, and rolling green you will want to drop onto them yourself.’ Seventeen years after the bombing, Dornstein is married (to his brother’s first love, incidentally), a father and at peace with the loss.”
–Publishers Weekly

David Dornstein was killed when terrorists blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. This brilliant, intricate memoir is the result of younger sibling Ken discovering the journals and writings that David left behind. Ken weaves these into a work that also includes the ruits of his own exhaustive investigation into his brother’s life. Simply told, it’s is a marvelous act of remembrance, and abiding fraternal love.
–Cargo Magazine

posted by Ken Dornstein on March 21, 2006 12:32 AM