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A review by yetilibrary
Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for My Twelve-Year-Old Bully by Allen Kurzweil
2.0
Whipping Boy wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be. At nearly 300 pages, you'd think that the author wouldn't wait until the last 12 or so to actually confront his bully, but you'd be wrong.
Two-thirds of the way in, this exchange occurs:
Ruth nails the problem within moments of discussing Cesar (the bully in question) with Allen Kurzweil; it's a shame the editors of this book didn't do the same. Allen wanders all over the place in what's supposed to be his search for Cesar, occasionally literally (his search crosses continents), and sometimes figuratively (thanks for that sketch of foosball players, bro). He KNOWS this stuff is irrelevant, he KNOWS he's avoiding the real search and the real issues, and yet neither he nor his editors leave any of the filler out. As I noted above, Allen doesn't truly confront Cesar until there are about 12 pages left, and what ought to be the emotional denouement is a three-quarter-page, rather detached summary that made me wonder what the hell I'd been doing with my time. I could have forgiven all of his dithering and intellectual wanderings if he had just given the book an emotional payoff: instead, he robs the reader of even that.
Whipping Boy earns the two-star rating because the fraud case at its heart--yes, the bully himself is superseded by a fraud case he was involved in--is rather interesting. The author's son, Max, has some great moments with Allen (and great "lines," such as they are) too. In fact, I found myself thinking that this book would be much better if it had been written by Max about his father's search, instead of by Allen himself.
Two-thirds of the way in, this exchange occurs:
"Is it possible you're digging too deeply?" Ruth [author's cousin] asks.
"More than possible. It's a total certainty . . . "
Ruth nails the problem within moments of discussing Cesar (the bully in question) with Allen Kurzweil; it's a shame the editors of this book didn't do the same. Allen wanders all over the place in what's supposed to be his search for Cesar, occasionally literally (his search crosses continents), and sometimes figuratively (thanks for that sketch of foosball players, bro). He KNOWS this stuff is irrelevant, he KNOWS he's avoiding the real search and the real issues, and yet neither he nor his editors leave any of the filler out. As I noted above, Allen doesn't truly confront Cesar until there are about 12 pages left, and what ought to be the emotional denouement is a three-quarter-page, rather detached summary that made me wonder what the hell I'd been doing with my time. I could have forgiven all of his dithering and intellectual wanderings if he had just given the book an emotional payoff: instead, he robs the reader of even that.
Whipping Boy earns the two-star rating because the fraud case at its heart--yes, the bully himself is superseded by a fraud case he was involved in--is rather interesting. The author's son, Max, has some great moments with Allen (and great "lines," such as they are) too. In fact, I found myself thinking that this book would be much better if it had been written by Max about his father's search, instead of by Allen himself.