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.
Kurzweil’s quest for answers uncovers a story more bizarre and dangerous than he ever imagined.
- A Childhood Nemesis: In an exclusive Swiss boarding school, a ten-year-old boy’s life is forever changed by the cruelties of his charismatic and sadistic roommate, Cesar Augustus.
- An Obsessive Quest: What begins as a schoolboy grudge evolves into a forty-year international manhunt, taking the author from the gilded boardrooms of Park Avenue to the slums of Manila in search of answers.
- Fake Royalty and Fraud: The search for Cesar plunges Kurzweil into the surreal world of international con artists, including a monocled grand master of the Knights of Malta and a gang of faux royal swindlers.
- Literary True Crime: Winner of the Edgar Award, this is more than a hunt for a bully; it’s a profound and witty meditation on memory, trauma, and the bizarre ways a childhood menace can become a lifelong muse.
