“Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul” by Tony Hendra. Hardcover. Random House

“Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul” by Tony Hendra ———————- This is the true story of faith, friendship, and family through the decades-long influence of a Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow. Like everything human, it started with sex. In 1955, 14 year old Tony found himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. In Cold War England, where Catholicism was the subject of news stories and bestsellers, Tony was whisked off by the woman’s husband to see a priest and be saved. What he found was different from the priests he’d known at school, where boys were beaten with belts or set upon by dogs. Instead, he met Father Joe, a gentle, stammering, ungainly Benedictine who never used the words “wrong” or “guilt,” who believed that God was in everyone and that “the only sin was selfishness.” From the 50’s and his desire to join an abbey himself; to the 60’s, when seeing Beyond the Fringe convinced him to change the world with laughter, not prayer; to the 70’s as an editor of National Lampoon; from drinking to drugs, from a failed marriage and the miracle of parenthood—the years only deepened Tony’s need for the wisdom of his other and more real father, creating a bond that could not be broken, even by death. Father Joe is the account of how Hendra learned to love; of a whole generation looking for a way back from mockery and irony, looking for its own Father Joe, and a testament to one of the most charismatic mentors in modern literature.