His Brother's Keeper

Yet the book is also Ken's story, as he grappled for nearly 20 years with the loss of a father-figure brother who seemed to want nothing more near the end of his life than to mold Ken into the real writer in the family. Thanks to David, Ken's life took astonishing turns of its own. It would be a shame to spoil the greatest surprise of the book — except to reveal that a few years after the bombing Ken became romantically involved with David's college girlfriend, Kathryn — but now, with the memoir done, he sounds eager to move on.

For a time, he kept thinking about an Edgar Allan Poe story called ''The Tell-Tale Heart,'' in which the narrator murders an old man and hides the body under the floorboards of his room. ''And,'' Dornstein explains, ''he tries to set up his normal life on top of this incredible, tragic thing. And it's not succeeding. He keeps thinking he's hearing a knocking'' — he believes it's the beating of the dead man's heart through the floor — ''and it's driving him crazy.'' For years, Dornstein says, David's was the heart beating under the floorboards, a noise Ken couldn't get out of his head, urging him to do something to remember his brother. So he did. Today, the younger Dornstein says, the knocking has finally stopped.

30 SECOND BIO

AGE 37

AGE HE'S WARY OF Thirty-eight. Dornstein's brother, David, died in a bombing when Ken was 19. ''At 38,'' he says, ''I hit that point where I've been alive longer after he was gone than when he was here.''

BROTHERLY LOVE In his writings, David constantly predicted his own early death. After the bombing, ''his letters took on a new feeling,'' Ken says. ''There was sage advice, given as if he was the grandfather who wasn't going to be around to deliver it when I was older.''

BIG ACHIEVEMENT David lives again — in Ken's book, at least. ''Ken has actually saved his brother's life on the page,'' says editor Jonathan Karp.