Rating: 
Summary: Spiritual Uplifting
Review: Don't get me wrong, though it is an uplifting book in many ways, you also see or should I say 'Feel' the heartbreak along the way. This is a Powerful read. There have only been a few books that have touched me so deeply-'Father Joe' is one of them, as well as 'Nightmares Echo','Running With Scissors'and 'A Million Little Pieces'
Rating:
Summary: It's not "Tuesdays with Joe"
Review: "Father Joe" is an unexpected stunner; not a "Me and My Mentor" book at all. It's a brush with greatness that wouldn't brush off. A real-life parable. An atheist's prayer.Don't be scared off by the "Father" in the title. It doesn't mean you have to know (or care) about Catholicism or any other religion to "get" the book. Its lessons are hardly church-specific. There's even a paradoxical quote from the title guy on this point: "God loves atheists as much as believers. P-p-probably more." Also don't be scared off by the idea of "lessons." This book preaches nothing. It discovers things -- resonant truths -- and the reader can't help but discover those truths along with the author. If you don't laugh, cry, and learn something from "Father Joe," you're already dead. Caveat: Have Google close at hand when you read. The author's language is clear but some of his analogies are a bit arcane. (Hendra's scholarship appears to predate his Cambridge education. His 14-year-old self, as recounted in the book, knows more than most adults I can think of.) It's hard not to be embarrassed bringing a standard American education to this party, because we are generally taught so little about literature and history. Update June 8 -- based on feedback here, I started a Yahoo discussion group for "Father Joe" at groups.yahoo.com/group/father_joe_group
Rating: 
Summary: very disappointing
Review: Father Joe's luminous spirituality and sound sense shine through, but far too much of the book deals with with Hendra's not especially interesting life. The author's life is only interesting to readers when he brings his issues to Father Joe.
The rave reviews this book received attests to the hunger for genuine spirituality in an age of charlatans posing as men of God peddling the gospel of mammon on TV and with a dangerous evangelical in the White House.
Rating:
Summary: Funnier than the death of Little Nell
Review: From FATHER JOE: "I danced as I ran, yelled whatever came into my head--bits of songs, schoolboy whoops, Latin tags--I flung myself around in mad pirouettes ... I was real, me, a Me, not an idea or a possibility or someone else's incomplete theorem or a mutinous bundle of neurons."
Well needless to say, ya gotta have a cast-iron stomach not to fwow up at Tony's puppy-dog piety. Luckily, Father Joe turns out to be less nauseating than Little Tony. And it's to Joe's credit that he doesn't bore us to death with religious dogma: "unlike the pious, he didn't speak of Christ very much".
From FATHER JOE: "Our classes were seated in alphabetical order, and right in front of me for my first 3 years was an inarticulate homunculus named Stephen Hawking. The great utility of Hawking to his classmates was that he could do math and physics homework at the speed of light--a concept, by the way, only he seemed able to grasp. He usually had the homework finished by the end of lunch hour, and the thuggier element of his class--including me--found it easy to persuade him to share it. Our math and physics marks were terrific, until the inevitable day of a test, which Hawking would finish in minutes and sit snuffling and grinning and doodling for the remainder of the hour, while the rest of us sweated thru the now-incomprehensible scientific runes. The custom of using Hawking as a source for spiffy homework marks persisted until sometime in the third year when he began moving at warp speed. Now he would take a fairly simple problem of, say, calculus as a pretext for a far-ranging dissertation expressing itself in pages and pages of equations and formulae that no doubt stepped just short of the event horizon."
Tony didn't get around to mentioning it, but Stephen Hawking's infirmity is yet one more proof of God's malevolence. You're living in a world where Napoleon survived the Napoleonic wars without a scratch and Stephen Hawking ends up a cripple. Which clearly shows you that God is basically evil.
Tony also forgot to mention that all of the following people died at age 33: Jesus H. Christ, Lester Bangs, Doug Kenney, & John Belushi.
Confere the following entry from Kenneth Tynan's diary: "Sh-ts never die young. Cyril Connolly once said to me that longevity was the revenge of talent on genius. It's also the revenge of sh-ts on nice people. Look at the list of the prematurely, unforgivably dead from among my own acquaintances--Kay Kendall, Dylan Thomas, Harold Lang, Pauline Boty, Alan Beesley, Dominic Elwes (how I hope the last two have met in some uproarious afterlife, as they never did on earth!), Steve Vinaver, Gerry Raffles ... Yet all around me the b-stards survive and flourish. Surely there is a dark undertow to the life force that drags pure spirits under. It's enough to make a Manichaean of me."
Rating:
Summary: True and Important
Review: I am going to peg the meter on this one because it is a wonderful, interesting life story pointing to the real way out of the mess we get ouselves in, even if successful, and shows that love and truth can be found even under centuries-old dogma. Maybe I am predjudiced in favor because it parallels my own life experiences so well and, being in a different field, I have not been able to chronical them so beautifully. I might give it only a 4 because of writing style: Hendra uses words that sent me to the dictionary so many times I eventually gave up and tried to get the meaning from context. He apparently does not have a modern editor(who tend to not allow words they don't know), and he is either trying to use his Cambridge education, pulling our leg, or just doing it unconsiously (if so I admire his intellect). But the importance of the message and getting to know the wonderful Father Joe more than makes up for extravagant language. Five! And a hearty recommendation to read by all either in or out of the Faith.
Rating: 
Summary: What am I missing?
Review: I bought this book as soon as I read Andrew Sullivan's ecstatic review in the New York Times Book Review - the review seemed to promise that Father Joe would accomplish all that self-help books set out to do, but that it would do so with none of the genre's intellectual flimsiness. This book was going to give me wisdom, spiritual enlightenment, and peace of mind, and it was going to do it in a narrative so gripping that I'd read through the night. It seems highly possible that my expectations were set unrealistically high, but this book delivered on very little of its promise. The narrative is, first of all, about as gripping as your average episode of Behind the Music (Innocence leading to Corruption leading to Redemption) - I don't find Behind the Music particularly un-gripping, but it certainly doesn't keep me up past my bedtime. More disappointing, though, is the figure of Father Joe himself. He seems, based on the little we see of him, like a sweet, sweet man. A good listener, open-minded, not too self-serious. But the portrait we get of him is nowhere near full enough to warrant the life-changing ecstacy promised by Sullivan and other reviewers here. Father Joe is here presented as being less complex than many cartoon characters, and not much wiser than many a book of Inspiring Quotations - what is it about this portrait that so many people have found so affecting? If you aren't a fan of books like Tuesdays with Morrie and Five People You Meet in Heaven - books I was hoping Father Joe would soar beyond - then I'd advise you to save your money. I sold my copy the day I finished it.
Rating:
Summary: inspiring
Review: I dearly loved this book. It revealed a lot to me, stuffs which I have never experienced, but find enriching. Above all, I was taken into a journey to meet a man I would have loved to know in my life. I appreciated the writer's command of the English language. We need more writers like this. It is an inspiring book to read.
Also recommended: DISCIPLES OF FORTUNE
Rating:
Summary: Good book, excellent narration
Review: I enjoyed the book, but having the author read is aloud adds another dimension. The author is an excellent narrator. When he reads it, it never lags. I wish there was a narrated version with just the dialogue between Father Joe and Tony. (By the way, I don't want to hear in the book just how bad a father he was. I am glad the book spared me this.)
Rating:
Summary: Thumbs Down
Review: I found this book difficult to finish because the protagonist, Tony Hendra (not Father Joe), is not a likeable character. Tony Hendra's "tribute" to Father Joe is actually a memoir of his own rather selfish life, which unfortunately included using Father Joe's name to sell his book. If you looking for sage advice from Father Joe, you will find little of it in this book.
Rating:
Summary: A book that really is impossible to put down
Review: I have rarely read a book that I truly couldn't put down--Anna Karenina, Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers Once and Young--everyone has their own list, and religious books are not likely to be on many people's lists. But Hendra really has written a religious book that is almost impossible to put down until it is finished. His decades of writing comedy are apparent in this masterful memoir, not because there are funny passages in the book, although there are, but because of his superb ability to see into the heart of a dramatic situation and to tell the story well. Somebody said that a sense of humour is a sense of perspective, and Hendra has perspective on many aspects of the complex, subtle, and powerfully moving story of his soul's interaction with the great spiritual mentor Father Joseph Warrilow. This is a book that every reader will come to terms with in their own way, so I will confine myself to a few general remarks. It is amazing how vividly Hendra recalls the crucial events that led up to, and included his encounter with Father Joe, which occurred 40 years ago. These life changing experiences are recounted in a way that is cinematic and vivid--totally opposite to the vagueness with which he recounts the sex, drugs and rock n'roll period that constituted much of his adulthood. Secondly, this book threatens to turn into a "I screwed up my first marriage but then I figured out what I did wrong through my wonderful second marriage to my wonderful, and much younger, second wife" (in this part of the book, Hendra ironically echoes Joe Esterhazy's recent memoir Hollywood Animal)--but then Hendra has another plot surprise up his sleeve which rescues his book from these doldrums and takes it back to its former, superb level. My final comment, which may sound ungrateful coming from a reader who absolutely loved this wonderful book, is that while Father Joe comes across as a great man, the author himself remains somewhat unlikeable, despite the transformations caused by Father Joe's decades of patient mentoring. The book has been compared to The Confessions of Augustine, but if this comparision is partly true, it is because of how it reveals the spiritual greatness of Father Joe, not because of what it reveals about the spiritual qualities of Hendra, who remains a sort of spiritual Everyman or Homer Simpson. But perhaps that is the secret of its strange, gripping power, come to think of it . . .
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