Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully Contributor(s): Kurzweil, Allen (Author) |
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ISBN: 0062269496 ISBN-13: 9780062269492 Publisher: Harper Paperbacks OUR PRICE: $18.04 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2016 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Family & Relationships | Bullying - True Crime | White Collar Crime |
Dewey: B |
Physical Information: 0.7" H x 5.3" W x 8" (0.50 lbs) 320 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Winner of the Edgar(R) 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Kurzweil, Allen: - 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. |