The next time you're feeling down on the world, pick up a copy of Greg Barrett's new nonfiction book, "The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok."

Honolulu readers may remember Barrett from his years as a reporter here, especially from the stories of little Alana Dung, 3, who sparked a statewide bone marrow drive and drew 38,000 new potential donors to the list.

Barrett's new book takes readers to Thailand, but the advice of Hawai'i's-own Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell rates a mention.

"The Gospel of Father Joe" stories look at the hardscrabble, complication-weighed lives of youngsters living in Bangkok's dirtiest corners and the dedication of the U.S.-born Catholic priest who singlehandedly has built an institution to support them. The book will not only make you feel spoiled and guilty, but uplift you too. This part-biography, part-journal-of-life philosophy will give you an immediate attitude adjustment, especially when you see that all the characters in this real-life story possess an overabundance of joy — in spite of their surroundings.

At the center of the book is the Rev. Dr. Joseph Maier, known as Father Joe (or Khun Phaw Joe) a priest from Washington state who came to Thailand as a young man to work with the poor. In the more than 35 years that Father Joe has lived in the Klong Toey slum in Bangkok, he has built the Mercy Centre schools, orphanages and hospice for youngsters dying of AIDS. Today, he has evolved into somewhat of a global icon.

In one scene in the book, Maier storms through the dining hall of the Mercy Centre and taps fists with the children as he shouts, "The AIDS brigade, the AIDS brigade!"

The AIDS-stricken children giggle and show no expressions of the doom that others might see for their lives, Barrett writes.

"The great contagion at Mercy wasn't Fern's TB," he writes of one of Mercy's young residents. "It was the positive air blowing that very moment through the cafeteria. Moving child to child to child, the crazy American with knobby knees and calves of cordwood shuffled sideways, almost skipping."

Barrett, who left Honolulu to become a Gannett News Service journalist, first met Father Joe in 2000 and was taken with his presence. As Barrett writes, Maier is one of those people who carries a sense of good that spreads around him.

"Beyond the palm trees, rain trees and indoor plumbing that made his Mercy Centre schools, hospice and orphanages a shaded utopia in the middle of desperate poverty, there was something else," Barrett writes. "A palpable, powerful something else ran through the small campus, breathed a sense of joy into children dying. Although I couldn't fully capture and define it, I felt it. That ineffable 'it.' "

Five years later, Barrett would return to delve into that "it," traveling to Bangkok four times to spend weeks with the priest.

The book is partly a story of the two men's friendship, part biography and part a detailing of Father Joe's beliefs about life and the world. It is boosted along by Barrett's writing, which is clear, thoughtful and pleasingly devoid of cliches. Barrett presents a well-rounded picture of Father Joe — compassionate, ornery, and in the opinion of some colleagues, an eccentric.

The reader gets to know Father Joe as an impish man with a penchant for telling muckety-mucks exactly how he feels, and who hands out coins to the children of Klong Toey. The reader learns his frustration with a Bangkok economy of haves and have-nots, many of the latter forced into prostitution.

Learn more: www.thegospeloffatherjoe.com