Given the downward spiral of David's brief life, we're forced to ponder whether the Libyan terrorists eventually charged...
The disturbing story of a passenger on the doomed Pan Am Flight 103, written by the victim’s younger brother, an editor for PBS’s Frontline.
Dornstein was only 19 when his 25-year-old brother David was killed in the terrorist attack over Lockerbie, Scotland. In this grim, often depressing account, the author digs deeply into his erratic brother's past, seeking not only to recreate his brother's final days, but to burrow into his mind and soul. David Dornstein was a would-be writer whose craving for fame and success far outstripped his talent, and his life had been spiraling downward even before his graduation from Brown in 1984. Although he filled notebook after notebook with his meandering, autobiographical prose, David was far better at imagining himself a successful author than in focusing on the task of becoming one. His personal life was equally troubled. Though handsome and likable, he bounced from one squalid apartment, menial job and failed relationship to the next, while his college friends moved on. When David boarded the Pan Am flight, he was on his way home from Israel, fleeing a promising relationship with an attractive woman. There's a strange, almost creepy element to Dornstein's near-obsessive pursuit of his dead brother's ghost: The author initiates a close friendship with David's former Israeli girlfriend, then later befriends—and eventually marries—his brother's college sweetheart. Dornstein's search also uncovers a childhood secret that helps to partially explain his brother's self-destructive behavior. There are powerful, chilling moments in this story: Dornstein's visit to Lockerbie, where he treads the very ground on which his brother's body fell to Earth, and his final goodbye to the rebuilt skeleton of the 747 in a remote hangar in England. Elsewhere, the narrative stalls, as the author gets buried under the rambling, unfocused writings that grew in unfinished piles in his brother's rooms. Eerily, David had often imagined himself dying young in a plane crash—he presumed it his quickest ticket to fame.
Given the downward spiral of David's brief life, we're forced to ponder whether the Libyan terrorists eventually charged with the bombing didn't spare him an even sadder end. It’s the most disturbing part of this penetrating but uneven story.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-50359-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A laudable, if cautious, attempt to reclaim the literary status of an important American author from successive waves of neglect and politically charged reinterpretation. Placing Jewett firmly within the pantheon of late 19th century intellectual society, Blanchard (Margaret Fuller, 1978) blends biography and textual analysis to reveal a life of apparently astonishing balance. Born in 1849 in the comfortable and bucolic town of South Berwick, Maine, the daughter of a broad-minded physician, Jewett managed the difficult feat, notes Blanchard, of gaining fame and fortune ``simply by going her own way and doing what she liked to do.'' Although she was past 40 when her most enduring work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, appeared, Jewett, despite crippling bouts of rheumatoid arthritis, began publishing in her teens. At 32 she established her extraordinarily successful liaison with Annie Fields, widow of publisher and Atlantic Monthly founder James T. Fields, and thereafter shuttled happily between her beloved Maine and the highbrow salons of Boston. While giving ample play to Jewett's singular achievement of creating a life and art that constantly sustained and reflected her intellectual and spiritual interests, Blanchard, in her meticulous portrayal of the world of educated 19th-century women, skillfully demonstrates how unexceptional her subject's life appeared within its heady environs. Similarly, her probably asexual relationship with Fields, seen by many as ``perhaps the classic `Boston marriage,' '' was unremarkable in an era of flowery ``romantic friendships'' between accomplished, independent women who rarely had the option of combining work and family. By the same token, Jewett's literary themes—notably the importance of community, a Transcendentalist reverence for nature, and a realism leavened by optimism—were addressed to and embraced by readers of both sexes. Persuasively argued, this spirited work falters only in its failure to measure Jewett's achievements against the best, rather than the whole, literature of her time.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-51810-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A superb dual portrait of the 32nd President and his First Lady, whose extraordinary partnership steered the nation through the perilous WW II years. In the period covered by this biography, 1940 through Franklin's death in 1949, FDR was elected to unprecedented third and fourth terms and nudged the country away from isolationism into war. It is by now a given that Eleanor was not only an indispensable adviser to this ebullient, masterful statesman, but a political force in her own right. More than most recent historians, however, Goodwin (The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 1987) is uncommonly sensitive to their complex relationship's shifting undercurrents, which ranged from deep mutual respect to lingering alienation caused by FDR's infidelity. One element creating tension was tactical politics: FDR, seeing increased arms production as crucial to the war effort, sought to close the divide between businessmen and his administration, while Eleanor prodded him not to forget about labor, civil rights, and Jewish refugees. As grateful as he was to her for acting as his political eyes and ears, Franklin also could react testily to her unremitting lobbying at times when he desperately needed relief from the strains of running the war effort. Equally fascinating here are the often semi-permanent White House guests who filled the couple's "untended needs": their daughter and four sons; FDR alter ego Harry Hopkins, shaking off grave illness to go on critical diplomatic missions; Franklin's secretary Missy LeHand, prevented by a stroke from serving the man she loved; exiled Princess Martha of Norway, who gave Franklin the unqualified affection of which Eleanor was incapable; two of Eleanor's confidantes, future biographer Joe Lash and the lesbian ex-journalist Lorena Hickok; and Winston Churchill. A moving drama of patchwork intimacy in the White House, played out against the sweeping tableau of the nation rallying behind a great crusade.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-64240-5
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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