Customer Reviews

Lover of Life: F. W. Boreham's Tribute to His Mentor (Revised and Expanded)

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I am a Boreham collector but most importantly a Boreham reader!!!! If you haven't yet purchased a copy of this book don't delay. If you're not aware this is a reprint of Boreham's original and nearly impossible to find book, "The Man Who Saved Ghandi", the story of his friend and mentor, J.J. Doke. This also includes an introductory essay by the man who probably knows the most about F.W. Boreham, Geoff Pound. So purchase this book and support this new publishing endeavor and hopefully we will see more "new" Boreham books published by the John Broadbanks Publishers.

'Mr. Doke', as Boreham respectfully calls his friend and mentor, was by all accounts - or at least this one - a most amazing human being and pastor.

Here we have John Broadbanks Publishing's first effort at re-issuing out-of-print F W Boreham books. Congratulations to Geoff Pound and Michael Dalton for a beautifully put-together version of Boreham's 1948 book The Man Who Saved Gandhi: A Short Biography of Joseph John Doke.

F W Boreham is Australia's and New Zealand's only really collectable religious author. So what was his special appeal? Well, he wrote about 50 very readable books (and over 2,000 newspaper articles), preached to large crowds in Hobart and Melbourne and around the world between the two World Wars, read thousands of books, but also had a pastoral 'common touch'.

And here we meet his mentor: an amazing man. Doke was - all in one person - a brilliant preacher, wise counsellor, gifted pastor, a passionate and holy Christian, lover of Scripture (he read the Bible through four times most years) and highly committed to 'foreign missions' (he died on a journey to encourage missionaries in the middle of 'darkest Africa').

And he may have been the most authentic Christian Gandhi ever met. Which makes a puzzle out of the Mahatma's often-quoted comment "Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ." Well, if we take Boreham's word for it, Doke was the man most-like-Christ of any he knew. And Doke was amazingly Christlike to the then little-known Gandhi when they met in South Africa.

You can read these 34 pages in one sitting. Don't. Buy it for your pastor, but read it slowly first. Order some copies to give away.

Shalom!/Salaam!

[...]

In the newly reprinted book, Lover of Life: F W Boreham's Tribute to his Mentor, the author draws back the curtain to pay tribute to one of his mentors, Joseph J Doke. "This is a tantalising sketch of a pastor, artist, author, who later in South Africa became a friend and freedom fighter with Mahatma Gandi in the struggle for the rights of minority races. Instead of a treatise on Effective Mentoring, F W Boreham in his inimitable way tells stories of how it worked for him and how pivotal such a relationship was in his own life and ministry".

The ministry of F W Boreham, as one of Australia's most prolific Christian authors is highly recognised. Dr Gordon Moyes once wrote, "I first read one of Dr Boreham's books in 1954. As a teenager I bought all I could find in second hand book shops. I read a chapter a day. Those books changed my habits for more than fifty years. ......Boreham taught me how to be a busy pastor of a church and at the same time write and communicate to a nation and our largest city. It was only after his death he became my most effective mentor. Fifty years ago, I learnt to repeat a famous introduction of him: "His name is on all our lips. His books are on all our shelves and his illustrations are in all our sermons." Now is the time for new generations to discover one of the greatest communicators and influential mentors in Christian history".

"Lover of Life" provides a wealth of insight and hopeful vision of what a mentoring relationship might become, a book you will want to read more than once!

Until recently I was not aware of the many works of F.W. Boreham. After reading Lover of Life a tribute to his mentor Joseph John Doke it has caused me to hunger and desire more of Boreham's writings. In Lover of Life he, Boreham, tells of the wisdom that was passed on to him by his mentor Mr. Doke as he called him. This wisdom was with grace, humility and a dash of humor. It is a book that one would read and reread for the little insights and truths that only could come from a true man of God. One could become almost jealous of such a friendship between Boreham and Doke. To mentor and be mentored from a loving heart is experienced between the pages of Lover of Life. Thank you Geoff Pound and Michael Dalton for bringing this out-of-print book back to life.

Augustine's mentor was Ambrose, Dante's was Thomas Aquinas, and C.S. Lewis's was George McDonald. Each gives appropriate credit to his mentor, and Ravi Zacharias gives such credit to Frank Boreham. In this book, Boreham credits Joseph Doke as his own mentor. It is a courtly gesture, but is it useful to the rest of us? I think it is.
Aside from alerting us to the gratitude we owe our own teachers, it can depict mentors in such a way that they become our own spiritual directors, even if to a lesser degree. Boreham achieves this effect in LOVER OF LIFE by giving us Doke in a series of verbal film clips.
As we watch Doke encouraging, teaching and alerting, often with gentle humor, always with a consummate respect for the immortal soul with whom he is interacting, we see an excellent way of living our daily lives in Christ.
This slender volume is worth far more than its price.