Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully

by Allen Kurzweil

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062269508
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/20/2015
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	116,624
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Part I Switzerland 1

Part II "We Hope to Make Your Journey Unforgettable" 45

Part III "A Lie, A Contrivance, A Fiction" 69

Part IV Submission 101

Part V Window Dressing 135

Part VI "What Lies Within Us" 155

Part VII Scoundrel Time 179

Part VIII "Paper in his Blood" 199

Part IX On Your Mark 221

Part X Parallel Lies 249

Acknowledgments 285

Editorial Reviews

What makes the book such a delight is less what Kurzweil uncovers that than the self-conscious absurdity he acknowledges in his search. Social media eventually reunites Kurzweil with his tormentor, and the inevitable confrontation, like the story, is both confounding and deeply satisfying.

The New York Times Book Review - Domenica Ruta

12/08/2014
Childhood trauma fuels an adult obsession and an exploration of a flamboyant criminal caper in this rollicking but unfocused memoir. Novelist Kurzweil (A Case of Curiosities) was bullied by a roommate named Cesar Augustus at a tiny Swiss boarding school—being whipped with a belt is the worst outrage—and later in life set out to learn what had become of his tormentor. He discovered after many years that Cesar had gone to prison for his involvement in investment fraud. Cesar is a marginal figure through much of the book, and when we finally meet him, his impact is underwhelming; he comes off as an evasive and self-deluding hollow man with a repertoire of pathetic shady business ventures. But 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, and on the investigators who caught them. The psychodrama between Kurzweil and Cesar doesn’t have much emotional payoff, but it makes a serviceable hook for a comic-opera true crime saga that’s ripe with hilarious humbuggery. Photos. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Whipping Boy is much more than the search for a bully. Kurzweil takes readers on a suspenseful and thrilling ride.

Bookish

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

Kurzweil does the delightfully unexpected: He morphs his story from a poignant memoir into a true-crime thriller.

NPR.org

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

Pleasure-packed…makes the wily con artists in American Hustle look stuffy by comparison.

Details

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

I enjoyed Whipping Boy on so many levels. It’s wonderfully conceived and wonderfully executed.

Ricky Jay

2014-11-04
One man's search for his childhood bully, who turned out to be far more than that.Sent to a Swiss boarding school run with clocklike precision at the age of 10, Kurzweil (Leon and the Champion Chip, 2010, etc.) endured a year of torment, especially from one student, a bully named Cesar Augustus. Thirty years later, the author's nemesis appeared as a character in one of his children's books, an event that triggered him to search for Cesar, as he still remembered the pain and shame of the verbal and physical abuse he suffered. Over the course of 10 years, Kurzweil became a master sleuth and discovered that Cesar was far more than a bully. Using the Internet and many other resources, the author discovered that Cesar had been involved in a major advance-fee banking scam, fronted by the Badische Trust Consortium, which involved millions of dollars, fake princes and knights, high-profile lawyers and gullible clients longing for the funds to finance their dreams. Kurzweil explores his longing to connect with and confront the bully of his childhood, who had become an adult con artist convicted twice yet still seemingly intent on scamming people in one way or another. His story reads like a European version of American Hustle, complete with men in monocles and silk ascots, fancy dinners in expensive restaurants and his own methods of espionage that he used to obtain information. His fast-paced narrative, with its rich details of the intricate nature of the scam and his uncanny ability to ferret out the truth, almost masks his underlying desire to talk to Cesar about that year in school. When he finally does, readers receive a satisfactory ending to this 40-year drama. 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