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.
How does a childhood grudge ignite a forty-year international investigation?
- A Forty-Year Obsession: Prize-winning author Allen Kurzweil's decades-long hunt for Cesar Augustus, the boy who tormented him at a Swiss boarding school, becomes a gripping international odyssey.
- Investigative Journalism Meets Literary Memoir: Follow a meticulously researched true story that takes you from the peaks of the Swiss Alps to the slums of Manila, and from the boardroom of a top law firm to the gates of a federal prison.
- A Bizarre World of Con Men: Uncover an improbable cast of characters, including faux royal swindlers, a monocled grand master, and the shocking truth of what the author's childhood nemesis became as an adult.
- Edgar Award-Winning True Crime: Discover the riveting, heartfelt, and suspenseful Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime, a poignant exploration of memory, loss, and the nature of justice.