Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully: An Edgar Award Winner

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Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime

The true account of one boys lifelong search for his boarding-school bully.

Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chroniclesprize-winning author Allen Kurzweils search for his twelve-year-old nemesis,a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some fortyyears, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where heendures horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroomof the worlds largest law firm to a federal prison camp in Southern California.

While hunting down his tormentor, Kurzweil encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux royal swindlers, a crime investigator with paper in his blood, and a onocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweilsriveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the parallellives of a victim and his abuser.

A scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that renders a childhood menaceinto an unlikely muse, Whipping Boy is much more than a tale of karmic retribution; itis a poignant meditation on loss, memory, and mourning, a surreal odyssey born outof suffering, nourished by rancor, tempered by wit, and resolved, unexpectedly, in abreathtaking act of personal courage.

Whipping Boy features two 8-page black-and-white photo inserts and 83 images throughout.

Reviews

"Kurzweil does the delightfully unexpected: He morphs his story from a poignant memoir into a true-crime thriller." -- NPR.org "Whipping Boy is like nothing I've ever read, an investigative memoir that's honest, funny, sad, and edge-of-the-chair suspenseful. I loved it." -- Dan Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition "Whipping Boy reads like a European version of American Hustle...Full of intrigue and suspense, the story follows the bizarre twists and turns of one man's journey to find and confront his childhood tormentor-ready-made for a film treatment." -- Kirkus Reviews "Whipping Boy is much more than the search for a bully. Kurzweil takes readers on a suspenseful and thrilling ride." -- Bookish "Pleasure-packed...makes the wily con artists in American Hustle look stuffy by comparison." -- Details "A fascinating, multi-pronged morality tale about victimhood, skewed perception and the liberation of facing your demons." -- Washington Post "A captivating hybrid of investigative journalism and memoir...Kurzweil is not simply settling a private score; he's standing up for anyone who has ever been bullied." -- Chicago Tribune "A memoir that reads like a thriller as the author circles the globe to find the man who made his boarding school days a living hell." -- Tampa Bay Times "Kurzweil crafts an entertaining, sharply reported picaresque centering on the colorful leaders of the scam, who bamboozled their marks by posing as monocled European aristocrats and produced a fake deed from the fictional King of Mombessa... A crime saga that's ripe with hilarious humbuggery." -- Publishers Weekly "This meditation on pain and memory...only sounds like fiction." -- Library Journal "I enjoyed Whipping Boy on so many levels. It's wonderfully conceived and wonderfully executed." -- Ricky Jay, author of Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric and Amazing Entertainers

Author Bio

Allen Kurzweil is a prize-winning novelist, children's writer, inventor, and journalist. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair. He is a graduate of Yale University and the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.