The bombing of Pan Am 103 on December 21, 1988, killed 259 passengers and 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, in the largest terrorist attack on Western civilians before 9/11. One of the victims was 25-year-old David Dornstein, a Brown University graduate and budding writer from Melrose Park who left behind a grieving younger brother, Ken, and notebooks eerily predicting dying young: "Humorously, tragically, I really am starting to believe that the only way any of these notebooks will mean anything is if I die an early death."

"David had put his life into his pages," Ken Dornstein writes. "Now those pages were his life, and I had moved them to the floor of my closet. What was I supposed to do with them? With him?" Ken, a PBS producer and author of Accidentally, on Purpose (1996), begins to resolve these issues in The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story (Random House). Ken visits the Lockerbie crash site where he contemplates David's final moments. Ken also quotes liberally from David's notebooks and correspondence to detail his mood swings, and Ken is obligated to confront family history—their mentally unstable mother, as well as a Philadelphia neighbor who probably molested David as a boy. Ken, an ex-private investigator, interviews David's friends and colleagues in an attempt to reconstruct his life—and in an unforeseen development with Biblical overtones ("what I now think of as Leviticus 18 problems"), he falls in love with one of David's former girlfriends.

Though Ken eventually describes the Netherlands trial of the two Libyans who carried out the Pan Am bombing, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is no dry geopolitical tome—it's a simple, heartfelt story about a man reconciling with his lost older brother.

Ken Dornstein reads Tue., April 4, 7 p.m., Barnes & Noble, 1805 Walnut St., 215-665-0716.