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.

Show More
Related

  • The Boys of Winter by Wayne Coffey

    601 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the book “The Boys of Winter” by Wayne Coffey, shows the struggle of picking the twenty men to go to Lake Placid to play in the 1980 Olympics and compete for the gold medal. Throughout this book Wayne Coffey talks about three many points. The draft and training, the importance of the semi-final game, and the celebration of the gold medal by the support the team got when they got home.

    Read More

  • The Castle by Rob Sitch

    825 Words  | 2 Pages

    Darryl’s life is worth fighting for. “You can’t buy what I’ve got.” ‘The Castle’ directed by Rob Sitch, about one man, his family and neighbours on the verge of being homeless. Darryl Kerrigan, the “backbone of the family” won’t stand for that. Of course no one can buy what he has. He’s spent almost his entire lifetime building what he has, why should he give it up? Darryl’s way of life is simple yet filled with family values. 3 Highview Crescent is the home to Darryl, his wife Sal and their 3 children: Wayne, Steve, Tracy and Dale. (Wayne currently being in jail.) The house is made up of love, and simple family values. Darryl’s also added bits and pieces to it. He’s added on so much to the house, his own personal touch. His neighbours, also in the same bout are almost family to the Kerrigans. Jack and Farouk are another reason why Darryl’s ready to take matters into his own hands.

    Read More

  • Icarus By Wendy A. Shaffer

    240 Words  | 1 Pages

    Thirdly, we need to look at the poem “Icarus” by Wendy A. Shaffer. The poem is talking about free will versus obedience and conformity through the main character Icarus. The title named Icarus and nothing more, suggesting to the reader that this is solely about him or that we should concentrate on him. The poem opens with asking if what thoughts passed in Icarus’ mind as he approached the sun and his wings began to melt. The speaker of the poem that Someone who question Daedalus’ role as the father or someone who thinks of Icarus as adventurous and maybe even a bit careless. After that It then moves on and asks if Icarus ever questioned his father’s motives. The poem ends with his fall and the final questions about failing fathers, but the

    Read More

  • The Theme Of Hope In Edwidge Danticat's A Wall Of Fire Rising

    930 Words  | 2 Pages

    Guy, a working husband and father struggling to feed his family, from “A Wall of Fire Rising”, reveals the depth of his despair when he decides to take his own life. Throughout the story, Guy talks of flying

    Read More

  • The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

    950 Words  | 2 Pages

    The killer angels is a world acclaimed novel that was written by an author known as Michael Shaara. In the year 1975, it was granted the Pulitzer Prize for creative writing. It gives us in details the occurrences of the four days in the Battle of Gettysburg. This was during the American Civil War that occurred in the year 1863. At this time, troops that comprised of both the Union and Confederacy were at war in town called Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. This is a piece of story that is driven by disposition and narrated from the point of view of various heroes (Hartwig, 1996).

    Read More

  • Born Sinner in Flight by Sherman Alexie

    1054 Words  | 3 Pages

    Born Sinner Aren’t we all sinners? We all have committed acts of violence at some points in our lives, and our answer we are human, we are wired that way or it is our instinct. People have a habit of hurting one another and it comes naturally to them. After reading Flight by Sherman Alexie, violence is a prominent theme throughout the novel. This idea of aggression is represented in many different ways, shapes, and forms.

    Read More

  • A Child Called It By Dave Pelzer

    673 Words  | 2 Pages

    1. In the book, the father tries to help the son in the beginning but then throughout the book he stops trying to help and listens to the mother. If I had been in this same situation, I would have helped get the child away from his mother because nobody should have to live like that. The father was tired of having to watch his son get abused so eventually he just left and didn’t do anything. David thought that his father would help him but he did not.

    Read More

  • Comparing Black Boy And Jon Krakauer's Black Boy And Chris Mccandless

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    While nonfiction has many sub-categories as a genre, most outline a person overcoming adversity to complete a goal. This idea is displayed in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Both books tell the story of an ultimate goal and the path to achieving this. Richard Wright and Chris McCandless both have virtuous and negative qualities, but they ultimately achieved their goals.

    Read More

  • The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi

    1398 Words  | 3 Pages

    In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.

    Read More

  • The Struggle in Black Boy to Find a Figure of Manhood to Emulate

    760 Words  | 2 Pages

    Black Boy is an autobiography about Richard Wright’s life, and his struggle for freedom. Throughout this book, Richard strives to find a model of manhood to emulate, but ultimately fails.

    Read More

  • Untitled and Advice to My Son, by Peter Meinke

    1107 Words  | 3 Pages

    It is often common to have an author or the writer of a certain poem write about similar topics and also reflect the same stylistic characters among his or her poems. In Peter Meinke’s two poems, titled Untitled and Advice to my son, he created them both using a specific tone and the same subject to create different themes. Both of these poems also included some of the important elements of poetry.

    Read More

  • The Man Who Was Almost a Man

    586 Words  | 2 Pages

    This short story written by Richard Wright is very well written, and has a very good plot and keeps the reader entertained throughout. From the dialogue to the characters, who inhabit the world crafted by Wright, its very intriguing. On the surface, it appears to be just a story about childhood disobedience in general, but the overall theme is much deeper than that. The story "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" is at first glance a story about childhood disobedience. However, it is much deeper than that: the story is about a young boy named Dave who is frustrated with how the other men he works alongside in the field.

    Read More

  • Richard Wright's Big Boy Leaves Home

    2258 Words  | 5 Pages

    Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” addresses several issues through its main character and eventual (though reluctant) hero Big Boy. Through allusions to survival and primal instincts, Wright confronts everything from escaping racism and the transportation (both literal and figurative) Big Boy needs to do so, as well as the multiple sacrifices of Bobo. Big Boy’s escape symbolizes both his departure from his home life and his childhood. Big Boy, unlike his friends, does not have a true name. This namelessness drives his journey, and Big Boy is constantly singled out in one way or another. The moniker ‘Big Boy’ is a contradiction—is he a large boy or is he a grown man?—and drives all of Big Boy’s actions. Throughout the story he hinges between childhood and adulthood, and his actions vary depending on which side he falls on at that exact moment.

    Read More

  • Themes in the Novel "Black Boy"

    1200 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...is also worth noticing that Black Boy is written in retrospective and thus offers the point of view of grown-up Richard Wright and reflects his thoughts on the events of his life twenty years after they actually took place.

    Read More

  • Persuasive Essay On Protecting Our Homeland

    1710 Words  | 4 Pages

    “Flight 208 to Los Angeles is now boarding. Section N you may now take your seats”. You looked down at your carry-on bag to make sure you have everything packed up, even though you took nothing out, and headed toward the flight attendant and handed her your ticket. As your walking through the tunnel, the sound of the planes jets put just enough pressure on your body, causing your pulse to increase. “Why are you nervous, you been on planes before”, you ask yourself. You shake your head and start to inhale and before you could finish getting your lungs to the maximum capacity they could hold, a man wearing a white shirt twice his size and jeans that also seemed

    Read More

More about The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky by Ken Dornstein

Open Document