Whipping Boy

<p><strong>Winner of the Edgar(R) Award for Best Fact Crime</strong></p><p>The true account of one boy's lifelong search for his boarding-school bully.</p><p>Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller <em>Whipping Boy</em> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>A scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that renders a childhood menace into an unlikely muse <em>Whipping Boy</em> 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.</p><p><em>Whipping Boy</em> features two 8-page black-and-white photo inserts and 83 images throughout.</p>