Whipping boy - Allen Kurzweil

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 chroniclesprize-winning author Allen Kurzweil’s 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 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’sriveting 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.