Awards

• Winner of Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Fact Crime) 2016
• Winner of Edgar Award (United States).

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.

Full Product Details

9780062269492

Table of Contents

Reviews

Kurzweil does the delightfully unexpected: He morphs his story from a poignant memoir into a true-crime thriller. -- <b>NPR.org</b> 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. -- <b>Dan Okrent, author of <em>Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition</em></b> Whipping Boy reads like a European version of American Hustle...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. -- <b>Kirkus Reviews</b> Whipping Boy is much more than the search for a bully. Kurzweil takes readers on a suspenseful and thrilling ride. -- <b>Bookish</b> Pleasure-packed...makes the wily con artists in American Hustle look stuffy by comparison. -- <b>Details</b> A fascinating, multi-pronged morality tale about victimhood, skewed perception and the liberation of facing your demons. -- <b>Washington Post</b> 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. -- <b>Chicago Tribune</b> 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. -- <b>Tampa Bay Times</b> 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... A crime saga that's ripe with hilarious humbuggery. -- <b>Publishers Weekly</b> This meditation on pain and memory...only sounds like fiction. -- <b>Library Journal</b> I enjoyed Whipping Boy on so many levels. It's wonderfully conceived and wonderfully executed. -- <b>Ricky Jay, author of <em>Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric and Amazing Entertainers</em></b>

Kurzweil does the delightfully unexpected: He morphs his story from a poignant memoir into a true-crime thriller. -- NPR.org 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, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Whipping Boy reads like a European version of American Hustle...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 Whipping Boy is much more than the search for a bully. Kurzweil takes readers on a suspenseful and thrilling ride. -- Bookish Pleasure-packed...makes the wily con artists in American Hustle look stuffy by comparison. -- Details 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 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 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... A crime saga that's ripe with hilarious humbuggery. -- Publishers Weekly This meditation on pain and memory...only sounds like fiction. -- Library Journal I enjoyed Whipping Boy on so many levels. It's wonderfully conceived and wonderfully executed. -- Ricky Jay, author of Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric and Amazing Entertainers

Author Information

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.

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