The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky

Blurb

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a 2006 memoir by Ken Dornstein about his older brother David Dornstein, who was killed in the Pan Am 103 bombing on December 21, 1988. David had dreamed of becoming a great writer, but died at the age of 25 without having published anything. The book traces his younger brother's attempt, years after the crash, to finally get to know and understand him, through research, interviews, and David's own voluminous writings: letters, drafts, and innumerable spiral-bound notebooks filled with "andom thoughts, poems, dream images, bizarre theories, pretend interviews, scalding self-critical passages and the outlines of impossibly grandiose projects."
David and Ken Dornstein grew up in Pennsylvania; David was six years the elder. After graduating from high school he attended Brown University. David dreamed of becoming one of the world's great writers, although most reviewers say that his writing wasn't very good. At the time of his death there were reports that he had with him on the plane "the manuscript of a brilliant novel eagerly awaited by an American publisher", but in fact "here was no great novel, and there was never going to be one."