Winner of the Edgar(R) 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.
