Whipping Boy

The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully

by Allen Kurzweil

On Sale: 01/19/2016

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Whipping Boy

The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully

by Allen Kurzweil

On Sale: 01/19/2016

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Amazon Indigo

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Book Overview
Author Info

Edgar Award

About the Book

Winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Fact Crime

The true account of one boy’s lifelong search for his boarding-school bully.

Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles prize-winning author Allen Kurzweil’s search for his twelve-year-old nemesis, a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some forty years, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where he endures horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroom of the world’s 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, Kurzweil’s riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the “parallel lives” of a victim and his abuser.

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

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

Critical Praise

“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