{"product_id":"the-boy-who-fell-out-of-the-sky-isbn-9780375707698","title":"The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe story\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eof one man’s search for the truth about his brother—and himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hugely satisfying ... [Dornstein's] journey ... reveals not just the truth about the Dornstein brothers but about love, loss, and ultimately life's inescapable transience.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDavid 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlmost 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.“Hugely satisfying ... [Dornstein's] journey ... reveals not just the truth about  the Dornstein brothers but about love, loss, and ultimately life's inescapable transience.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Creating narrative coherence out of awful accident  is, I suppose, a textbook way of dealing with grief.... [But] Dornstein's skill  as a writer makes the raw material [of his brother’s life] seem tailor-made for the  form he has chosen.... It's a compelling, sad, thoughtful book.\" —Nick Hornby,  \u003ci\u003eThe Believer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“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.”—\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Without an ounce of self-pity or melodrama, [Dornstein] 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.” —\u003ci\u003eThe  Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003eKEN DORNSTEIN has been published in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e and has received two Yaddo artist  residencies. He is the series editor at PBS's \u003ci\u003eFrontline\u003c\/i\u003e and lives near Boston with  his wife and two children.I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The night my brother died, I slept fine, back in my old bed in my old   room in the old house where I grew up. I came downstairs late the next   morning. My father and stepmother had left for work, but I was on my   first day of Christmas break from college. I had nothing to do, and the   entire day to do it. I found the newspaper laid out on the kitchen   table. The headline ran in giant letters across the front page-PLANE   WITH 259 ABOARD CRASHES, DESTROYS 40 HOMES IN SCOTLAND. I started to   read:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    lockerbie, Scotland-A Pan Am jumbo jet bound for New York with 259   people, many of them Christmas travelers, crashed last night into this   Scottish village, exploding into a huge fireball and setting ablaze   dozens of homes and cars. No survivors from the Boeing 747 were found.   The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, although speculation   centered on either structural failure or sabotage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There were other stories on the bombing as well: \"Fire Fell from the   Sky 'Like Liquid.' \" \"All On Jet, 11 in Town Are Killed.\" There were   also pictures-a Scottish police officer peering into the plane's   crushed cockpit lying in a field; houses and cars on fire; a woman   collapsed on the floor of JFK airport (she'd just been told that her   daughter was on the plane). I skimmed the stories. I also checked the   sports page and the police blotter in the suburban \"Neighbors\" section.   A pizza delivery man had been robbed of $120 at knifepoint not too far   from where I lived. News is just news to those not immediately   affected, and my brother, David, was not supposed to fly until later in   the week.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I finished breakfast and puttered around. At around noon, I turned on   the television. Again, the bombing. Now there was news footage from   Scotland. I remember the blue lights of the ambulances streaking into   town and the hospital doctors looking useless waiting for injured   passengers who would never arrive. There would be no injured, the   anchorman said, \"only dead.\" I remember the houses on fire and that   cockpit in the field still looking sort of like a cockpit. It was   Thursday, December 22, 1988. David had been dead on the ground in   Scotland since Wednesday night, but I didn't know it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I have come to think of the impact of my brother's death in dramatic   terms: a curtain dropping on my youth, a terrible storm that left me   shipwrecked, the start of a new life. But this language came much   later. Events unfolded in a much more everyday way: The phone rang and   my father, home early from work, answered it. A sales agent from the   airline said she might have some unfortunate news about a David   Dornstein. Is this the family of David Dornstein? The agent said she   needed to check the final passenger list. She said she needed to   cross-reference one thing with another. She said she needed to speak   with her supervisor. She said she needed to get people in London or   Scotland or New York or somewhere to \"sign off.\" She said things were   still a little confused. So could you please bear with us? Could you   please hold?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My father waited on hold by himself initially, and then he called   upstairs to me. I found him at his desk. \"Pan Am is on the phone,\" he   said. David boarded the plane at Heathrow, the woman from the airline   had told him, but for some reason she wasn't ready to say that David   had been on the plane when it exploded. My father held the phone away   from his ear and let his head slump. I could hear the airline's hold   music through an amplifier my father had put on the phone because of a   bad ear: Dionne Warwick's \"Do You Know the Way to San Jose\" . . . a   Muzak version of \"When I'm Sixty-Four\" . . . that trumpet song by Chuck   Mangione-Do do doooooo, do do-do do-dooooo, da da da da-daaaaaaaaa. The   phone call from Pan Am was strange, and the news likely tragic, but the   experience of being on hold was familiar. It was as if we had called   the airline to book a flight, a winter getaway. Except we hadn't. The   airline had called us, and this, we knew, could not be good.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When the woman from Pan Am came back on the phone, my father mainly   listened. If he said anything it was on the order of \"Hmm hmmm\" or   \"Yes, I understand.\" Maybe he said nothing. Then he set down the   receiver. The message had been delivered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Neither of us spoke. If we said nothing, if we shut off the lights, if   we stood perfectly still, would the news go away? No. My father and I   both had heard the final ax blow land, even if the tree had not yet   tipped and fallen. We took a last quick look at the world as we had   known it, and as the world still seemed to be-but for the fact of that   phone call-and then it all came crashing down.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What happened next for my father is not for me to tell. He may not even   recall the details; we've never spoken about it. But I remember my own   reaction, and it still troubles me. I didn't cry or put my head in my   hands or collapse like the lady from the picture at JFK. I was still. I   understood the loss as my father's, for the most part, and I thought   about how to console him. I looked down from above as the scene in the   bedroom played out: those two pitiable souls, my father and I, rats in   a maze of grief they had just begun to feel their way around. I felt   sorry for them, but sorry like I might feel for the survivors of an   earthquake somewhere (there was one in Armenia that same month); sorry   like I'd initially felt for the victims of Flight 103 when I read about   them in the paper that morning-which is to say, not that sorry at all.   It was intolerable for me to have a personal connection to this story,   so I simply decided not to.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My father began making calls-one to a friend to cancel dinner plans,   another to my sister, who said she'd be right over. My stepmother   walked in from work a few minutes later and collapsed in the doorway   after hearing the news. My father helped her to a chair. I didn't know   what to do. I walked back upstairs. The book I'd been reading was still   propped open at the place where I'd left off. A glazed chocolate   doughnut sat on a white napkin, half eaten. I am embarrassed to say   that I finished it. I was hungry. Now what?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    David's old room was next door. I peeked inside. The room was just as   he had left it, but now, I knew, it had become a room in a museum. I   lay down on David's bed, thinking maybe I could channel his spirit   through his sheets and blankets. The house was quiet for a while.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Time had been suspended, a giant parenthesis had opened up in my life,   and I could have stayed there a long time. But then the doorbell rang   and the parenthesis closed. Men and women in their hats and coats were   arriving at a house of mourning. Well-wishers. They walked through the   front door on the verge of tears. They talked in small groups, with   hushed voices. Someone asked me where we kept our drinking glasses,   almost apologetic for wanting something to drink at a time like this. I   pointed someone else to the bathroom. A dozen or so people were in the   house within an hour.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Soon the Eyewitness News team would be in the living room. David's   picture, yearbook-pose false, would be beamed throughout the tri-state   area, the local angle to the international news story. Mothers mixing   noodle casseroles would glimpse my brother's face and think, How   handsome (my father would later mistake a picture of JFK, Jr., for   David). And then: How awful.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was overwhelmed by a sense of the wrongness of what was happening, or   if not by the wrongness, then by the sheer pace of events. I felt that   David would have been disappointed at how quickly we had accepted the   news of his death, and how readily we had set in motion the machinery   of memorialization. One minute he was alive in our minds, headed home   from a long time away; the next minute the phone rang and we were   burying him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I refused to be enlisted into this gathering army of the bereaved. I   slipped out the door and into the backyard. I dropped to my knees on   the frozen ground, thinking I should pray, but I didn't know any   prayers. Then I lay down, looking up. It was cold, but I couldn't be   bothered with so small a matter as my own warmth. I had ventured out   into the winter night to make some kind of celestial connection with my   dead brother and I assumed I would be insulated from such worldly   concerns by the sheer drama of the situation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don't know how long I was outside. At one point a jet flew overhead,   and I watched the blinking lights on the wings and tail move across the   sky. I thought of the snug world inside the cabin, the ice clinking in   the first-class glasses, the reading lights being dimmed, the endless   rearrangements of blankets and pillows at the start of a night flight.   And then I wondered what it would look like if the plane suddenly split   in two and all of the people inside spilled out. Which is to say: I   tried that night, but it would be years before I could even begin to   imagine David's fall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      II\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I have started this story a hundred times in the years since David   died, but never finished. Let me begin again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Once upon a time, I had a brother. He was older, bigger, wiser, more   daring, more passionate, better spoken, and much better looking. He   traveled farther away from home than I ever imagined I would. I admired   him. I was nineteen when he died, a sophomore in college. Now I am in   my midthirties. I have some memories of my brother, but not as many as   I'd like to think. And each time I check, I seem to have one fewer. If   at first I found it hard to believe that David was dead, now I find it   hard to believe that he ever lived. David's life has come to seem like   a story I made up, a fairy tale, no more real than words on a page. I   sometimes find it dispiriting to think that this is what a life comes   to, that this is how it ends. But I can imagine David smiling about it.   Words were his life. And now the words he left behind would be more   vital than ever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    David was a writer. In the years before he died, he was working on   something big and, at least to me, mysterious. He wrote night and day,   filling dozens of spiral notebooks with his fevered thoughts and   phantasmagorical dreams. For a time, he told people he was trying to   write down every thought that had ever occurred to him. When he slept   it was on the floor, surrounded by books and papers. He renounced beds.   Later, he swore off banks, keeping his money thoroughly liquid-a wad of   cash tucked inside the pages of a book called The Irrational Man. This   was David: He played out every idea to the end.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One day David left home. He left the country. He said he had to go, but   beyond his initial destination he didn't know where, and he didn't know   when he would be back. He was twenty-five. He pledged not to return   until he had written something substantial or until he had otherwise   settled the question of his future as a writer. Before he left, David   copied into his notebook a passage from the novelist Thomas Wolfe about   the extraordinary troubles Wolfe had with an early novel:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I had been sustained by that delightful illusion of success which we   all have when we dream about the books we are going to write instead of   actually doing them. Now I was face to face with it, and suddenly I   realized that I had committed my life and my integrity so irrevocably   to this struggle that I must conquer now or be destroyed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We know this story: A boy heads off into the wild to kill a bear, and   he returns to the village a man. But in this case, the boy did not come   back. A newspaper feature called this \"A Tragic Twist on a Young   Writer's Life.\" According to the article, David carried a manuscript   with him onto Pan Am Flight 103, the draft of a brilliant first novel   finally on its way to expectant American publishers. But the novel was   presumed lost in the wreckage, loose pages of it spread across Scotland   along with seat cushions and insulation and other bits of the   disintegrating 747. Coming-of-age stories usually end with some   obstacles being overcome and the way ahead finally clear. But this one   seemed to have ended, at least in part-at least for David-at the bottom   of the North Sea with the rest of the lightest debris from Flight 103.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Was the \"Tragic Twist\" story true? I didn't know. I remember meeting   David's best friend, Billy, a month or so after the bombing and talking   to him about what we should do with David's writings. Even if there   were no novel to publish, I argued that we could put together an edited   collection of some kind. David had filled a giant cardboard box with   his notebooks and manuscripts. He labeled it in thick Magic Marker: the   dave archives. I told Billy that there must be material in there for   several books. I remember thinking we needed to strike fast, while the   world still cared about the people on Flight 103, but Billy and I never   formed anything like a plan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    David's papers sat unread for a long time. At one point, I decided to   catalog them. I ordered the notebooks chronologically and straightened   them on a shelf. I sorted loose typescripts into color-coded files. I   was careful to read only enough of each thing to fix a label to it:   fiction, poetry, plays, letters, etc. I told myself it was too sad to   read these pages, too difficult, too soon, too much, but my reasons   were much simpler. I feared what David himself had feared: that what   was inside those notebooks, what was typewritten on all of those loose   sheets, was not good enough to justify all of the big noises he'd made   about it. I feared that the grand plan had never been realized and that   David had hidden this fact from himself in a mass of paper. I feared   page after page of throat-clearing about a book that David would   forever be on the verge of writing. Wasn't the \"Tragic Twist\" story a   much better way to leave things?","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303459573989,"sku":"NP9780375707698","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375707698.jpg?v=1767738511","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-boy-who-fell-out-of-the-sky-isbn-9780375707698","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}