The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky by Ken Dornstein

1128 Words3 Pages

The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky by Ken Dornstein

Picture yourself, for a moment, among 243 passengers on a Boeing jumbo jet. It is two days before Christmas of 1988, and you are excited to see your family in New York. You are sitting comfortably in your coach class window seat in row 40, reading a poetry book by Charles Baudelaire. It’s 7:00 pm and about 35 minutes after takeoff; the plane is just leveling off at its cruising altitude. You hear the captain throttle back the engines now. Everything is perfect in this aircraft; in fact, it’s not really an aircraft at all. It’s more like a room than a metal tube; a room with perfectly vertical walls. By now, most people have actually forgotten that they are, in fact, inside an airplane. They are in a movie theater, a bar, or even their own home relaxing in their favorite recliner. Suddenly, you hear a loud noise from the front of the plane. You feel extreme pressure on every square inch of your body, like you have been hit by a train. Screams and shrieks fill the cabin, and then, very abruptly, everything ends, forever. This is precisely what happened to David Dornstein before he fell, already dead, 6 miles to the ground in Ella Ramsden’s front yard, the landing site for about 60 other individuals when the plane exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The Boy Who Fell out of the Sky by Ken Dornstein is a true story about David Dornstein’s life and how his brother Ken searches through his numerous letters, manuscripts, notebooks, and journals and interviews the friends of David to find out all that he can about his brother’s short life of only 25 years. Along the way, Ken finds out about some very sensitive subjects and horrible things that have happened to David. He also explores David’s past relationships and tries to combine everything together to create a documentation of David’s life so he can move on and live life without David’s interfering with his. The story also describes Ken Dornstein’s life after his brother dies and the paths he chooses to take to escape the enormous pressure of the death.

The Boy Who Fell out of the Sky is a non-fiction piece of work and is considered a biography. The subject deals with the life story of the author’s brother and how the author was immersed in it fully after his brother died.

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