Title of the Book: Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully
Author: Allen Kurzweil
Number of Pages: 292
Rating: ☆☆
Review:

           The childhood bully: we all either had one, were one, or in some cases were both victim and bully.  So, what do you do when as an adult you still not only remember your bully’s every transgression but feel traumatized by them?  You search for the bully of course.

Allen Kurzweil endured a year at a Swiss boarding school in 1971 with Cesar Augustus, the biggest and meanest boy at the school as his roommate.  Coming on the heels of his father’s death and feeling abandoned by his grieving mother, Cesar Augustus made Kurzweil’s 11^th year a living hell and the memories follow him far into adulthood.  From theft to whippings with a belt, to simply feeling alone and bereft in a new and frightening place, Kurzweil continues to relive his brief stay with long-lived memories.  As Kurzweil admits, “In 1971, I met a boy who changed my life forever.” And, “I began to acknowledge the obvious: Cesar had taken over my life.”

So, as an adult with a wife, young son, and a successful career as a writer, Kurzweil begins his search for his twelve-year-old bully.  Kurzweil must put his life on hold to finally put the memories to rest and with no Internet, begins a long journey of traveling, phone calls, and paper searches.  The search unfold with twits and turns as the reader gets to know more about Kurzweil and realize that he is not exactly an appealing protagonist and that Cesar Augustus has quite a background of his own – spanning continents and ending with his involvement in a brilliant, but ultimately flawed money scheming that included fake royalty, bilked law firms, and endless victims.  As the book progress, the reader starts to wonder how much of the search is actually about Cesar and more about Kurzweil never really dealing with the death of his father as a young child.

Kurzweil is avid and completely dedicated to his search, but quite frankly, the detail in which he writes about his search loses it’s appeal quickly as Kurzweil loses himself in self-pity and his writing wanders from its original track.  The reader slowly, very slowly unravels Cesar and his life and intentions as Kurzweil writes and both Kurzweil and the reader finally find a satisfying conclusion with not only Cesar who at this point has become secondary, but Kurzweil’s underlying intentions with his forty-year search when Kurzweil admits what the reader has thought all along,  Kurzweil  “The search for Cesar had always been, at its core, a search for someone else.  Observing his through a two-way mirror for as long as I had ultimately enabled me to catch reflections of myself in the glass.  And who stared back?  A victim.  An obsessive.  A boyfriend.  A husband.  A father.  A journalist.  A completionist.  A stalker.  A frightened five-year-old gripping the hand of his dying father.”

If you have the time and patience to unravel Kurzweil’s wandering and very slow revelations this book is for you.  If you are wanting to read about someone connecting with and confronting his childhood bully to grow as an adult, find another book.