Allen Kurzweil - Whipping Boy : The Forty-Year Search for a Twelve-Year-Old Bully read ebook TXT, DOC, MOBI
9780062269485 English 0062269488 Equal parts investigative memoir, crime procedural, and revenge thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles the author's real-life search for the childhood nemesis who has haunted his life for over forty years. Abused as a ten-year-old at a prestigious English boarding school nestled in the Swiss Alps, Allen Kurzweil, author of the acclaimed bestseller A Case of Curiosities, takes the reader around the worldfrom the Vienna Woods to the slums of Manila to the boardroom of the world's largest law firm high above New York Cityto locate and confront his long-lost tormentor, a twelve-year-old named Cesar Augustus (who tied him up and whipped him to the strains of "Jesus Christ Superstar"). What begins as an anxiety-fueled quest for revenge takes an elaborate detour when the author discovers that Cesar has recently been released from federal prison for his role in a byzantine scheme perpetrated by a felonious duke, a Congolese king, a fugitive prince who traces his roots back to Vlad the Impaler, and a spats-wearing baron born in Toledo, Ohio. You can't make this stuff up (unless you're a world-class swindler). By chance, Kurzweil finds himself privy to the voluminous files of the federal prosecutor who brought Cesar to justice, and a journalist's curiosity clashes with a victim's fear of facing down his old nemesis. A scrupulously researched work of non-fiction that reads like a John Le Carré novel, Whipping Boy is more than a tale of karmic retribution. It is a heartfelt and darkly comic meditation on forgetfulness and memory, trauma and recovery, born of suffering and nourished by obsession, and resolved in a final act of courage. Whipping Boy includes 16 pages of black-and-white photographs and 91 images throughout., 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. What Lies Within Us is the story of the author's decades-long investigation of his boarding school bully, Caesar Augustus, the man he became (a high-class swindler), and the personal toll that has come from the author having had his dead father's pocket watch stolen and destroyed, and from being tied up and dramatically whipped to the soundtrack of "Jesus Christ Superstar." A book that defies categorization, What Lies Within Us is a scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that reads like the most unbelievable Tall Tale. No names have been changed. No details have been embellished. A memoir that morphs into one of the greatest (and funniest) tales of criminal fraud ever perpetrated, it is a story that begins in a tiny dorm room in a tiny Swiss village overlooking the Bernese Alps and quickly moves north to the Vienna Woods, then to garrets in Rome and Paris, the slums of Manila, the Republic of Congo, Lichtenstein, various law-firm conference rooms in New York, and the gilded suites of some half-dozen Leading Hotels of the World, and three Bay Area restaurants. The extraordinary facts revealed in this book--as Kurzweil pieces together Caesar's life of crime, and builds to a face-to-face meeting--are bolstered by an equally mind-blowing array of criminal and personal records, trial transcripts, birth certificates, photographs, deeds of trust, credit card receipts, audiotapes, and 8mm movies from the early 1970s. The arc and stakes of What Lies Within Us are nearly impossible to encapsulate, but the characters are unforgettable and classic: The Swiss sections of the book include a half-dozen educators plucked straight out of an Ealing Studios comedy. There's the founder of Aiglon College, John Corlette, a crackpot Christian educator who insists on being addressed as "JC"); his acting headmaster Group Captain Watts, a former RAF fighter pilot who struts about the campus with German shrapnel lodged in his shoulder (a keepsake from dogfighting in the Battle of Britain); Lady Forbes, a toothless elocution teacher famous for the calf's-brain sandwiches she serves with cocktails; and Mrs. Senn, a Housemistress who commits to memory every tragedy to have befallen her many charges. As his search broadens, the cast of characters grows markedly more sinister. The middle section of the book presents a rogues gallery of real-life hucksters: a fugitive prince who traces his roots back to Vlad the Impaler, a self-styled Grand Master of the Knights of Malta (Ecumenical); a felonious duke; a prevaricating African king; and a spats-wearing Toledo, Ohio window-dresser known as the Baron Moncrieff.The list of victims upon whom these men prey is no less striking: Chuck Norris, the Queen Mother, Gene Kelly, Pope Paul, Joseph Brodsky, executives from Merrill Lynch and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Ernest Bourgnine, the Archduchess of Austria and at least six ivy-league-educated attorneys employed by the largest law firm in the world. What Lies Within Us , at its core, is an "investigative memoir" born of trauma and nourished by obsession, a taut crime procedural, revenge thriller, and quest tale unlike anything Kurzweil could have cooked up as a novelist. Behold: the forty-year search for a twelve-year-old bully., 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., The true account of one man's lifelong search for his boarding-school bullyEqual parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles 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 tracking down his tormentor, the author 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 monocled 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 and richly illustrated 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.
9780062269485 English 0062269488 Equal parts investigative memoir, crime procedural, and revenge thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles the author's real-life search for the childhood nemesis who has haunted his life for over forty years. Abused as a ten-year-old at a prestigious English boarding school nestled in the Swiss Alps, Allen Kurzweil, author of the acclaimed bestseller A Case of Curiosities, takes the reader around the worldfrom the Vienna Woods to the slums of Manila to the boardroom of the world's largest law firm high above New York Cityto locate and confront his long-lost tormentor, a twelve-year-old named Cesar Augustus (who tied him up and whipped him to the strains of "Jesus Christ Superstar"). What begins as an anxiety-fueled quest for revenge takes an elaborate detour when the author discovers that Cesar has recently been released from federal prison for his role in a byzantine scheme perpetrated by a felonious duke, a Congolese king, a fugitive prince who traces his roots back to Vlad the Impaler, and a spats-wearing baron born in Toledo, Ohio. You can't make this stuff up (unless you're a world-class swindler). By chance, Kurzweil finds himself privy to the voluminous files of the federal prosecutor who brought Cesar to justice, and a journalist's curiosity clashes with a victim's fear of facing down his old nemesis. A scrupulously researched work of non-fiction that reads like a John Le Carré novel, Whipping Boy is more than a tale of karmic retribution. It is a heartfelt and darkly comic meditation on forgetfulness and memory, trauma and recovery, born of suffering and nourished by obsession, and resolved in a final act of courage. Whipping Boy includes 16 pages of black-and-white photographs and 91 images throughout., 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. What Lies Within Us is the story of the author's decades-long investigation of his boarding school bully, Caesar Augustus, the man he became (a high-class swindler), and the personal toll that has come from the author having had his dead father's pocket watch stolen and destroyed, and from being tied up and dramatically whipped to the soundtrack of "Jesus Christ Superstar." A book that defies categorization, What Lies Within Us is a scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that reads like the most unbelievable Tall Tale. No names have been changed. No details have been embellished. A memoir that morphs into one of the greatest (and funniest) tales of criminal fraud ever perpetrated, it is a story that begins in a tiny dorm room in a tiny Swiss village overlooking the Bernese Alps and quickly moves north to the Vienna Woods, then to garrets in Rome and Paris, the slums of Manila, the Republic of Congo, Lichtenstein, various law-firm conference rooms in New York, and the gilded suites of some half-dozen Leading Hotels of the World, and three Bay Area restaurants. The extraordinary facts revealed in this book--as Kurzweil pieces together Caesar's life of crime, and builds to a face-to-face meeting--are bolstered by an equally mind-blowing array of criminal and personal records, trial transcripts, birth certificates, photographs, deeds of trust, credit card receipts, audiotapes, and 8mm movies from the early 1970s. The arc and stakes of What Lies Within Us are nearly impossible to encapsulate, but the characters are unforgettable and classic: The Swiss sections of the book include a half-dozen educators plucked straight out of an Ealing Studios comedy. There's the founder of Aiglon College, John Corlette, a crackpot Christian educator who insists on being addressed as "JC"); his acting headmaster Group Captain Watts, a former RAF fighter pilot who struts about the campus with German shrapnel lodged in his shoulder (a keepsake from dogfighting in the Battle of Britain); Lady Forbes, a toothless elocution teacher famous for the calf's-brain sandwiches she serves with cocktails; and Mrs. Senn, a Housemistress who commits to memory every tragedy to have befallen her many charges. As his search broadens, the cast of characters grows markedly more sinister. The middle section of the book presents a rogues gallery of real-life hucksters: a fugitive prince who traces his roots back to Vlad the Impaler, a self-styled Grand Master of the Knights of Malta (Ecumenical); a felonious duke; a prevaricating African king; and a spats-wearing Toledo, Ohio window-dresser known as the Baron Moncrieff.The list of victims upon whom these men prey is no less striking: Chuck Norris, the Queen Mother, Gene Kelly, Pope Paul, Joseph Brodsky, executives from Merrill Lynch and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Ernest Bourgnine, the Archduchess of Austria and at least six ivy-league-educated attorneys employed by the largest law firm in the world. What Lies Within Us , at its core, is an "investigative memoir" born of trauma and nourished by obsession, a taut crime procedural, revenge thriller, and quest tale unlike anything Kurzweil could have cooked up as a novelist. Behold: the forty-year search for a twelve-year-old bully., 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., The true account of one man's lifelong search for his boarding-school bullyEqual parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles 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 tracking down his tormentor, the author 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 monocled 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 and richly illustrated 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.