WHAT CRITICS SAY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEN DORNSTEIN is a documentary filmmaker and producer whose films have premiered at Sundance (Happy Valley, Long Strange Trip), aired on PBS FRONTLINE, and won almost all of the major broadcast awards, including My Brother's Bomber which won several Emmy’s. Dornstein is also the author of Accidentally, On Purpose, a cultural history of a unique American underworld which he encountered during his time as a private investigator in Los Angeles.
SYNOPSIS
David Dornstein was twenty-five years old, with dreams of becoming a great writer, when he boarded Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, a terrorist bomb ripped the plane apart over Lockerbie, Scotland. Almost a decade later, Ken Dornstein set out to solve the riddle of his older brother’s life, using the notebooks and manuscripts that David left behind. In the process, he also began to create a new life of his own.
A hugely satisfying book.. [revealing] truths about love, loss, and ultimately life's inescapable transcience.
Daniel Akst
Boston Globe
Humour, absurdity, bathos, drama, tragedy, excitement... [a] shocking, complex and profoundly thoughtful study of loss and survival.
Alexander Masters
Stuart: A Life Backwards
''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..."
Daniel Akst
, Boston Globe
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. ..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...
Marian Fontana
, Washington Post
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.
Big Book Of The Month
, Esquire
Ken Dornstein's investigation of his brother David's life and death is a considerable, multifaceted achievement…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.. 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
, "Book of the Week"
Time Out London
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)
One cannot help but compare this story with Joan Didion's recent "The Year of Magical Thinking,"...Like Didion, Dornstein meditates upon and attempts to put into order all manner of lists, facts, procedures, receipts, dates, letters and transcripts…Dornstein believes that if he could just assemble all the facts, perhaps some hidden truth could be found... In the end, this book stands on its own... 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
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.
Margaret Heilbrun
, Library Journal
Dornstein skillfully weaves David's writings with his own memories of his brother... 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
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
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.
Williams Grimes
, New York Times
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
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
, SD Union-Tribune
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.
Louise Carpenter
, Daily Telegraph
Two things make this a gripping read. First, David's extraordinary personality...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.