Reviews

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

leeann20's review against another edition

2.0

That was not a search for a bully, that was a crime drama, bank fraud that had a minor character blown up to a major part because of one year in the author's life.

estherd1's review against another edition

4.0

I’m a bit torn about this book. While it was an interesting read, I’m not sure what the point of this book is.

librarykath's review against another edition

3.0

Any of us who have been bullied can identify with Allen Kurzweil's lifetime of churning those events around your head trying to think of WHY the bully chose you for torture. Kurzweil takes this even further (thanks to his incredibly obsessive personality) and decides to track down his boarding school bully. His bully, Cesar, turns out to be not your average childhood bully, and Kurzweil takes you on a journey of European royalty, billion dollar frauds, pyramid schemes and multiple aliases.

I did get a little bored with the detail of the Badische case, but overall a good read. I do wonder though now how Cesar reacted to this book, and how it has affected him.

tenten's review

informative medium-paced

3.0

this was a weird reading experience. a memoir about the author, Allen Kurzweil's, decades long search to find out what happened to his childhood bully, Cesar, the book takes a turn when  Kurzweil discovers that Cesar is arrested in an elaborate financial fraud scheme. haunted with memoirs of being whipped by Cesar, as well as placing the blame for his late father's precious watch being stolen and lost on Cesar, the book—and Kurzweil's life—are colored by these events.

the early parts recounting his childhood elicited the most emotion for me. i really empathized with Kurzweil. but as the book went on, that empathy turned to pity. reading about his on-and-off obsession with Cesar that lasted decades had me thinking, at various intervals, "damn, he shoulda got therapy." don't get me wrong - the two most traumatizing incidents of Kurzweil's time at Aiglon were terrible, but his obsession was unhealthy, and there is very little reflection on this from him. his thinking is black and white to the point of discomfort, i.e when he practically scoffs at Cesar's recounting of the abuse he suffered at Aiglon, or wishing that his sentence was carried out in a worse prison than the one he ended up in. Kurzweil so thoroughly convinced himself that Cesar was a dangerous criminal mastermind, a belief that even victims of the fraud scheme find incredulous, that he seems blind to how depressing it is that he is so fixated on this guy. i mean, his life is great in comparison to Cesar's, but that seems to be overshadowed by the pain from childhood he held onto so fiercely for many years.

it seems to me that this book was an attempt to remedy his unwillingness to tell anyone about the bullying while it was happening, and his tendency to downplay it as an adult. even in the book, there's an air of lightheartedness to his recounting of his childhood at boarding school, but it is clear that these events pained him. there's very little reflection on this - at most he refers to himself as a stalker, but he doesn't really unpack any of this very much. hopefully he did so with a therapist because ultimately, despite how interesting the financial fraud scheme was, this book just made me feel sad for Kurzweil.