Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It's been a few months since my first reading of this book. Since that time, I've picked up the book for a second and third read. After reading the book, the first time through, I came away with much the same complaints that other reviewers have noted: the book lost it's path, somewhere in the middle, and didn't capture the reader as it did it the first few chapters.
The second and third read allowed me to see this book for what it really was. If you buy this book to seek out details about David (Ken's brother who was killed by terrorists in the Lockerbie crash) or the Lockerbie crash, you will be mildly satiated. This book delivers nothing technical that couldn't be gathered from a careful reading of crash data or other forensic studies of the incident. However, if you want to "take a journey" with someone who has lost a loved one in a highly publicized (and scrutinized) event: THIS is the book for you. Somewhere during the second reading, I realized that this was not a book about David or the crash. It was not about the forensics. The forensics were a convenient back drop for the real story: how a man lost his hero. Ken lost his big brother and hero. With this book, he gives you a personal and tragic glimpse into what it means to be the survivor. You often wonder if the boy who fell out of the sky was actually Ken, and NOT his brother, because you watch the author fall (and fall hard).
Great book. Thanks for allowing us to observe your journey!

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.

... into the light of grief is a powerful thing. For years, Ken Dornstein was eclipsed by his brother David and the promise of what he yearned to become: the next great American writer. Picking the path of most resistance, David struggled, starved, and gave his life to Bohemia, believing it would feed his creative soul. When David boarded Pam Am Flight 103 on his way back from a respite in Israel, he was every bit the confused, lost soul much of his short, adult life seemed to propagate. Twenty years later, Ken finally deals with his grief, by bringing it out of his brother's immense shadow, into the light of literature, in the haunting book "The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story".

David Dorstein's facts play out normally. College graduate from Brown. Two relationships. A trip to Israel. Boarding a flight. The end. Ken illimunates the times between these facts with such painful clarity and honesty, you feel as if maybe Ken is telling you too much about his brother; possibly it's too revealing. David definitely struggled with his craft, unsure of what to write, plaguing self-doubt that was painfully honest. His life quickly became a mess after college. shown both through his physical presence and his actions.

Ken, younger by a few years, was left to puzzle this out, being a distant witness to some of his. Chiming in whenever his memory allows, Ken brings his somewhat calming perspective to David's chaos. Without these pieces, this book may have wandered into a memoir without much purpose. It's not much fun reading about how someone's life falls apart, who dies before the pieces assemble, but Ken attempts to do that with his own narration.

Ken starts out the book from the airplane crash, and it's the first chapter that is most riveting. Bringing the horror of the bombing back alive again, when our memories are clouded by the more recent 9/11 attacks, we are reminded that all wasn't always rosy before then. Ken goes to Lockerbie some eight years after the bombing to start to face his brother's demise, to make sense of the event himself. He discovers things about the accident he didn't know before. He asks questions that we readers would want to know, and then feel equally as frustrated when he doesn't receive the answers.

The much maligned genre "memoir" has been the hot topic of conversation as of late, due to the fanciful ministrations of authors wanting to embellish their previous pasts. Dornstein's book has sealed that schism between authors and the public with an honest, oft confusing recounting of his brother's life. And he has the documentation, some thirty notebooks, his own interviews and research, to back up his story.

When Ken finds out that his brother died, he fails to mourn, and hides his grief. Hidden grief is devastating, and effects people in hundreds of untold ways. This book attempts to bring the grief of his lost brother to light; exposing it to the sun. By the end, we sense a reconcilitation between the brothers, a reconcilitation as much that can happen, and a gentle peace of calming. David visits the supposed Garden of Eden a few days before his death; Ken visits it mentally by the end of his own book.

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?"

It interesting to read the notes about this book that were written by people who knew/went to school with David Dornstein (the brother of the author). After reading the book and all the notes saying how "brilliant" David was, I must confess that I didn't get that at all from the book. I thought his musings were just vacant ramblings. It seems that David didn't become a famous writer because David was missing a crucial part of being a writer: focus. He never finished anything because all he was thinking about was fame (as opposed to his narrative). This book was only interesting when it was dealing with the plane crash and its direct effects on the family. The passages that included David's musings were painfully dull and I was left with the impression that David was mentally ill like his mother. Basically, I think that David made a big show of his "brilliance" to everyone he knew but it was all smoke and mirrors. I'm also sorry to say that if Ken was more of a writer, he would have found a way to make this book more interesting. I wanted to like it but I just felt like I was slogging through it hoping to reach the end.

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'?

Apparently, Ken Dornstein devoted a major part of his 20s and 30s to investigating the life and death of his older brother, David, killed in the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, when Ken was 19 years old. In this memoir, Ken reports the results of his investigation and describes, to some degree, the impact of David's death on Ken's life. I would have preferred less of former and more of the latter.

As described in this book, David Dornstein was an bright, attractive man who harbored ambitions of becoming the Great American Writer of his generation. It seems clear from this book that David was also mentally ill. He was unable to finish any of his writing projects. His post-college way of life was chaotic, failing to provide him with the necessities of life or to advance his literary ambitions. Although Ken reports the facts supporting my description of his brother, he seems unable to face these facts himself, maintaining his belief in David's grandiose vision of himself.

More interesting than David's idiosyncracies is the impact of David's death on his survivors: Ken, his parents and sister, and David's former girlfriend (and Ken's present wife)Kathryn. Unfortunately, the book is quite sketchy in dealing with these issues. While I understand that writing about living family members can be emotionally (and legally) riskier than writing about a man who has been dead for 17 years, I would have liked to have read more about the living. Particularly, I wanted to know more about the Ken's decision to marry and have a child with David's former girlfriend. For me, this book did not answer the questions that most interested me.

The premise of this book is very compelling, containing the makings of an intriguing and haunting memoir/biography. Indeed, the early chapters are well written and quite promising.

But the story gets lost, bogging down under the author's self-absorbed meanderings, and his heavy reliance on rambling, not-so-brilliant excerpts from David's notebooks.

The book falls short because Dornstein fails to examine what's at the center of all this: his own fixation with his charismatic and deeply troubled older brother.

There is a universally true story in here, tragic and quirky and surprising, but Ken Dornstein may have been too close to be the one to write it. Too bad.

After having just finished "the boy who fell out of the sky" I was curious to read what others had thought of the book so I came to Amazon to check out some of the reviews. Only now, after reading the reviews left by others, do I feel compelled to write one of my own.
I do not think of myself as a particularly good writer and generally don't care much for leaving reviews but I feel really annoyed with regards to certain reviewers distinctive characterizations about David Dornstein's mental health. I find it incredibly lazy, obnoxious and arrogant for people to just write off the author's brother as "mentally ill." David Dornstein was an artist. And, like so many artists before him, he battled with self-doubt, the inability to finish his projects and grandiose ideas of fame and fortune that got in the way of his true talent (his brother Ken pulls no punches in sharing this, by the way.) Also like many artists, he experienced a major trauma early in his life that left him with feelings of shame and scarred. But to write him off as just "mentally ill" does the man a great disservice and in my view, is disrespectful. He was clearly a very deep thinker and feeler and certainly he had his demons but he was also a dreamer and ultimately his story is the sad tale of unfulfilled promise. But there is no question in my mind, he was talented. I guess it's easier for people to think of him as a cautionary tale perhaps, to make themselves feel better about their pedestrian lives.
Anyway, rant over.
The book is as much about Ken as it is about his brother. It is a powerful story that defies easy definition. It is the poignant but never sentimental story of Ken's search to make sense of his brother's life and death, and the journey he takes to make sense of his own life, lived without the brother who cared so much for him. Funny and at times quite dark. I was totally engrossed. I found it to be a deeply moving, satisfying experience and ultimately life-affirming.