Ken Dornstein

Author Ken Dornstein's brother David was on Pan Am flight 103, which was destroyed by a terrorist's bomb in 1988. The 25-year-old David, and all the other passengers, were killed when the bomb went off and the plane crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland.

This memoir tells the story of Ken's struggle to reconcile himself to the death of the older brother he adored and his quest to understand who David really was.

Ken throws himself into a prodigious research project, seeking out David's friends, lovers, and acquaintances to gather every impression and memory they can share about David. He scours medical and first-person accounts of how the body reacts when a plane breaks up in mid-air, with grizzly details of the physiology of suffering rapid decompression at 30,000 feet. He reads, re-reads, and re-re-reads David's letters and notebooks. He travels to Lockerbie to visit the locations where victims of the crash fell, and interviews the police and investigators who were at the scene in 1988. He even goes so far as to track down one of David's old girlfriends -- and marries her.

According to articles published at the time of the crash, David had an unpublished manuscript with him on the plane. It was a virtuoso first novel that would have set the literary world ablaze, but was destroyed and scattered in the wreckage. It quickly becomes clear this anecdote is a myth and that David was not the super-human novelist in waiting that Ken (and David....perhaps), had imagined.

By turns creepy, poignant, and fascinating -- and always brilliantly written -- "The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky" is a compelling read. A telling account of how the living put their lives back together when the dead are gone.… (mer)