The Boy Who Fell out of the Sky: A True Story » (Reprint)

Ken Dornstein has been published in The New Yorker and has received two Yaddo artist residencies. He is the series editor at PBS's Frontline and lives near Boston with his wife and two children.

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. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is the unforgettable story of one man’s search for the truth about his brother--and himself.

The Washington Post - Marian Fontana

Most memoirs chronicling loss deal with its immediate aftermath, the searing pain of raw and unexpected grief, but in Ken Dornstein's haunting new memoir, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky, the author tries to understand the loss of his only brother -- killed in the terrorist airplane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. Not just a tribute to the brief and complicated life of David Dornstein, the book is a kind of catharsis for the author, whose own identity was all but destroyed on that day.