Dimensions
153 x 230 x 27mm
From the acclaimed author of A CASE OF CURIOSITIES, Allen Kurzweil's stranger-than-fiction "investigative memoir", detailing his 40-year-search for his boarding school bully who tied him up at the age of twelve and whipped him to the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar, and who went on to lead a mad-cap life of international crime and financial fraud. 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.
