Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story. By Matt O’Connor. London: Orion Publishing, 2007. 357 pages. www.orionbooks.co.uk. $34.95.

Fathers 4 Justice (F4J) has electrified men’s activists, fathers’ rights activists, and—let’s face it—pretty much everybody else around the world with its spectacular whirlwind of death-defying demonstrations and side-splitting humor. Matt O’Connor is the founder and mad genius behind F4J. I am glad that I was able to meet him and spend a weekend with him at the DC True Equality Conference in July 2007, because his book is as wild, delightful, annoying, and—in the end—indispensable as is the man.

And yet I nearly did not make it past the first fifty pages, filled as they are with O’Connor’s braggadocio, irrelevancies, charm, and self-importance. As goes the man, so goes F4J. Ironically, O’Connor is (as I am) afraid of heights, and thus could never have dreamed of carrying out many of his greatest creations. Luckily, he found many co-conspirators bearing different sorts of gifts. Among these is the utterly remarkable Jolly Stanesby (whom I also met in DC), one of the most noted monument-scalers, and truly a man willing to push himself to the edge and well beyond in pursuit of justice.

O’Connor strikes one as, if nothing else, a phenomenally sincere and straight-ahead sort of bloke. The reader feels no reason to disbelieve him when he tells us that the idea to found F4J came to him as he was literally about to end his life by a jump from a bridge, and thus he was in a very concrete way the first person whose life was saved through the organization.

The author’s “rules of engagement” are simultaneously delightful and edifying: Keep it simple; make it eye-poppingly theatrical; use ridicule, satire, and subversion; research, research, and research; never lose sight of what you are trying to achieve; and always have at least two backup plans to cover every eventuality.

F4J’s virgin campaign saw two rented double-decker buses crammed with more than two hundred Father Christmases stopping by the office of the Lord Chancellor (head of the British legal system) a week before Christmas 2002. One of F4J’s next principal escapades took activists to shut down the UK’s largest family court to commemorate Father’s Day 2003, but only after strategically diverting the authorities with a televised announcement of F4J’s supposed plans to protest at CAFCASS, the UK’s “family court advisory service.” Fascinatingly, later in the story, O’Connor manages to negotiate an agreement with CAFCASS that it will support shared parenting in exchange for F4J steering clear of protests targeting its offices.

The author isn’t afraid to show us his organization, warts and all, including numerous planned activities that went awry. One of the most bizarre is when F4J travels to Portugal to try to spring a UK citizen who has been imprisoned there for months. The prisoner, who was wrongly accused of kidnapping his own children, rejects F4J’s offers of help! A happy ending later ensued as F4J managed to get him returned to the UK, where he made history in a famous legal case and ended up both reunited with his daughter and converted to F4J’s cause.

And then sometimes things simply went wrong. The author provides fascinating, exciting glimpses of protests that go badly, including chases by the police and escapes by activists that would do any action movie proud. At one event, they needed a 50-foot ladder (the largest then available) to scale the Royal Courts and yet one F4J foot soldier turned up with one only 35 feet long. F4J’s top Spiderman, David Chick, was regrettably un-savvy in his media interactions, revealing his identity despite stern instructions otherwise and thereby allowing the opposition to dig up dirt from his past.

F4J was, if nothing else, truly a seat-of-the-pants operation. One amazing tale has Matt narrowly saving the life—through improvised yet inspired negotiation–of a monument-scaling protester on whom police have their guns trained. Matt O’Connor has a deep understanding of the immensely important role fathers play in their children’s lives and the tragic consequences of their absence, and it motivates him to keep F4J plugging away even after his own personal situation is happily resolved. He provides a helpful list of seven ways to save your family, each accompanied by a full paragraph of explanation: Don’t listen to your lawyer; don’t go to court; go for shared parenting; don’t leave the family home; do mediate; do provide support for your kids; don’t denigrate the other parent; and never hate your partner more than you love your kids.

F4J was also plagued throughout its history by a number of other challenges. Activists’ availability fluctuated wildly, if understandably, depending on developments in their individual cases. Suicide threats were common and absorbed huge levels of resources. Signs were held upside down at critical moments. Police and newspapers hired infiltrators. Strangers rooted through O’Connor’s trash numerous times. He received many threatening phone calls and emails and his home telephone was bugged. F4J leaders stole membership fees, and infighting increased as membership and fame rose. A US junket was aborted with a heavy financial loss after the FBI was basically glued to the F4J members from the moment they left the airport. A return trip to North America was similarly marred by a trusted activist’s abrupt failure of nerves and consequent attempt to change F4J’s mission.

The humor is, the author notes at one point, a survival mechanism. At the same time, it is absolutely delightful. The condom bomb recipe is priceless, better than Julia Child. And the blow-by-blow replay of an action at York Minster is even better, including as it does the story of O’Connor being taken down in a tackle by two burly priests, followed by the author’s ‘sermon’ on father’s rights that ends up being heavily applauded by parishioners.

Then there are the unforgettable moments: Batman lands on Buckingham Palace. Tony Blair being hit with a purple bomb in Parliament. And even the end, when trumped-up charges that F4J was plotting to kidnap Tony Blair’s son led to the organization being disbanded. It took a lawyer and F4J activist undergoing six weeks imprisonment in a truly heart-wrenching story to resuscitate F4J. And so the story continues, with F4J having launched an effort to inject fathers’ issues into the upcoming US presidential elections.

Even for someone who lived in London for a year as I did, the book is likely to prove difficult to follow at times due to its numerous unelaborated references to British places and people. But it repays the effort many times over.

Perhaps the best way to end is by replaying an amusing note combining politics, humor and irony you would never believe if they were in a novel: Scotland Yard has been selling an souvenir that actually commemorates an F4J protest, showing Batman atop Buckingham Palace with the date of the event and the insignia of Scotland Yard’s royal protection unit. Like the book, and like the man, unique and priceless!