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    Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully
    Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully
    Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully
    Audiobook8 hours

    Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully

    Written by Allen Kurzweil

    Narrated by Allen Kurzweil

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 20, 2015
    ISBN9780062308573
    Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully
    Author

    Allen Kurzweil

    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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    Reviews for Whipping Boy

    3/5

    32 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Narrated by the author. Ten-year-old Allen Kurzweil was so tormented by his 12-boarding school roommate that it scarred him for life. As an adult he spends years trapped in a "prison of vengeance," tracking down whatever happened to Cesar Augustus. Initially I wanted to say Dude, get over it, and I worried that his obsession would impact his wife and son. But what he discovers about the adult Cesar becomes a compelling story of international fraud. A vicarious read for those similarly abused by childhood nemeses. The author's reading of his work is peppered with odd pauses that become more pronounced later in the book but aside from that, I was along for the ride.
    • 4/5
      The voice is clear and it's nice to hear when the words sound clear cut
    • 5/5
      I don’t even know what had me read (listen) to this book, but I ran it from start to finish on a Saturday. I put five stars because what a story! Phew! I could relate to so much of it and what I loved most is the perseverance of the author to get what was he was after, and he read it so well! One note of encouragement: Practice singing “Smooth Operator!"
    • 3/5
      "Whipping Boy" may not be a great book, but I'm glad that Allen Kurzweil wrote it. He seems pretty darn certain that he got something significant off his chest by doing so. As for the book itself, it's not the characters themselves but the surrounding weirdness that I found most interesting. The boarding school he and his bully attended seemed to mix a fetish for order and hierarchy with airy, specifically British ideas about the benefits of the great outdoors. "Whipping Boy" -- and the tireless research that went into it -- also gives you a chance to look at the business of fraud and fraud detection up close. Kurzweil's right when he claims that the scheme that his former bully got involved in was a really doozy: the principals dressed like the Sgt. Pepper's album cover and claimed dozens of titles and degrees. The most useful part of the book, and perhaps the creepiest, though, are the interviews that he conducts with his former bully near the end of the book. It's a portrait of a con man who trades on easy familiarity, bathes in self pity, petty resentment, and self-justification, and uses evasive language filled with new-economy and "spirituality" buzzwords. It's not revealing, but that's the point: his unremarkable blandness is what makes grown-up Cesar really unsettling. Whatever else he is, he's certainly a product of our modern environment. While Kurzweil writes well and the book does indeed go someplace, it rates as kind of light, in my opinion. I'm happy the author got what he wanted out of writing it, but otherwise can't really recommend as more than summer reading.
    • 2/5
      This was okay, not one of my favorite or even middle of the road likes. It's not great as an audiobook.
    • 1/5
      The premise of this book is intriguing: a man who goes in search of the boy who bullied him in childhood.The result, unfortunately, is a dreary, self-indulgent book that I could barely drag myself through.The beginning is good. But then the childhood part, which has left the author, Allen Kurzweil,so damaged he's consumed for decades, ends quickly and does little to impress the reader that what Kurzweil endured was so horrific. Absolutely, Cesar (his bully) was obnoxious, mean, cruel. But I'm still unclear as to why Kurzweil became obsessed with learning his fate. Then came the chapter about Kurzweil's family; lots of conversations here with his young son that were of no interest. And I wearied of Kurzweil often talking about being Jewish, then focusing on his family's Christmas celebrations.Then pages and pages of a supposedly intriguing collection of oddballs - including Cesar - involved in fraud. And finally, FINALLY, Kurzweil meets up with Cesar for mostly mundane conversation and then (spoiler alert) Cesar apologizes, though apparently he doesn't remember what it was that he ever did.Perhaps this could have worked as a magazine article, but probably not. It simply was not interesting.