Brothers Judd Book Reviews

Review of TheTuber (essay) (Wells Tower)

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:01 EST

The Tuber: Having constructed the greatest flotation device mankind has ever known, our fearless writer embarks on an ill-conceived, possibly insane crossing of alligator-infested North Florida via a string of seriously imperiled and incredibly beautiful rivers. (Yeah, it's a tube.) (Wells Tower, March 19, 2009, Outside)

The river is as black and flat as freshly screeded tar. Submarine visibility is at a distressing half-inch or so, max. Anything could be down there.

I’m floating the Wekiva River north of Orlando, moving at what feels to me like a pretty good clip, when a husky teenager in a decrepit red kayak slips up alongside.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Are there alligators in here?”

“Yeah, kind of,” he replies. “Just saw one back there. Not too big. Seven feet, about.”

“Back where, exactly?”

Obviously more intrigued by my vessel, he halfheartedly jerks a thumb upriver.

“Where’d you get that boat?”

“I made it,” I say.

He hoists his eyebrows in an expression of very mild impressedness.

“Awesome.”

He toodles off, leaving me to fend for myself in a craft that probably wouldn’t survive an attack by a determined koi.

There was, believe it or not, a time when an author could make a living off of writing magazine essays. Those days being long past, we no longer have many essayists whose work people specifically seek out. For a while, David Foster Wallace was king of the hill. Perhaps the most revered current practitioner is Patrick Raden Keefe. Wells Tower is highly regarded not just for essays like this one but for his short stories as well.

In this classic from Outside magazine, he makes the tubing adventure into his own madcap version of John Cheever’s The Swimmer. But where the original story is notoriously bleak, Towers’s tale is quite funny. Not only is he self-deprecating, his assistant is hilariously abusive and the locals are vocally skeptical of his mission. Mix in some natural history and you’ve got an exemplary instance of the once well-remunerated craft.

Grade: A

Review of Theo of Golden (Allen Levi)

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:01 EST

-PROFILE: How a nearly 70-year-old debut novelist published 2025’s breakout hit: With virtually no marketing or social media presence, “Theo of Golden” became a blockbuster. (Sophia Nguyen, December 24, 2025, Washington Post)

The author’s own path has taken a few twists. He practiced law in Columbus, Georgia, for 13 years, went abroad to the University of Edinburgh to study Scottish fiction and then became a full-time singer-songwriter, performing at corporate events and for Young Life, a Christian youth organization. For a couple of decades, the Atlanta airport was functionally his second home. Around 2010, tiring of life on the road, he ramped down his tour schedule to spend more time with his sick brother and aging father, a forester. For a time, he even returned to the law, briefly serving as a probate judge in Harris County. But when his term ended, “I didn’t know what was next for me,” Levi said. Then one morning, he was waiting in line at his usual cafe, taking in the portraits on display, and thought: Wouldn’t it be fun if someone bought all of them?

For my money, this delightful novel completes an informal trilogy along with Gentleman in Moscow and The Housekeeper and the Professor. Though they tell quite distinct stories, they are tied together by the characters at their center, formal older men who both we and the cast around them fall in love with. There is also an even more unlikely parallel to the film, F1, and the antecedents we discussed in that review, wherein the action is driven by mystical, even magical, creatures.

The title character here is an elderly Portugese gentleman by way of New York City who comes to live in the Southern river city of Golden. He finds lodging with a semi-retired financial advisor with whose family business he had some forgotten business dealings in the past. Theo begins buying the etchings that line the walls of a local coffee shop and presenting them to their subjects, inviting each of them - in a beautifully scripted letter - to meet him on a park bench. There he describes what he perceives as their character as revealed by the work of the artist, whose work he greatly admires. Often, this interaction changes the course of peoples’ lives. Several become close friends. A number end up receiving some assistance from Theo, openly or surreptitiously (to avoid embarrassment).

To say much more might spoil the pleasure of reading the book. Suffice it to say, it is one of the most deeply humane novels you’ll ever encounter.

Grade: A+

Review of The Interrogative Mood: a Novel? (Padgett Powell)

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:01 EST

There was one novel his agent couldn't sell and two manuscripts she wouldn't even show to people. One of these manuscripts was the series of questions, more questions and nothing but questions that became The Interrogative Mood. He'd begun it in reply to a colleague who sent emails composed themselves entirely of questions. Powell says he knew it was "fun", because he would feel "chipper" after working on it, but it didn't occur to him that he could do anything with it.

"One day I realised that I had 142 pages of it – it was long enough to be a book," he says. "While we were trying to sell a book that actually looked like a book I would periodically come across the manuscript and glance at it and say 'You know, I don't know what this is, but it's the best thing I have'."

Eventually his agent sent it to the Paris Review, where an editor called Matt Weiland fell in love with it and published an extract. As soon as Weiland moved back to book publishing at HarperCollins's Ecco imprint, he called back and asked if Powell's agent had sold the rest of the manuscript. "She laughed, said no," Weiland recalls. "I asked to consider it there formally, then hesitated, fearing my new colleagues would think I was insane – this, the very first book I raise?" Luckily his colleagues at Ecco loved it too, and The Interrogative Mood was published to rave reviews in 2009. Like You and I, Powell explains, any large-scale structure in The Interrogative Mood is "left to some sort of sub-conscious accretion".
-INTERVIEW: Padgett Powell: Leaving 'cuddly realism' behind: The American author who came 'back from the grave' with a novel composed entirely of questions, tells Richard Lea how he's written his way out of conventional storytelling (Richard Lea, 18 Jan 2012, The Guardian)

It is probably fitting that the reader’s response to a book (novel?) made up entirely of questions (maybe 2500 of them?) is not to offer answers but, instead, to interrogate it and its author. In the first instance, the title itself includes a question mark after “Novel”, so we ask: “Is the person asking all these questions a fictional character or the author himself?”

I sort of assume it is the author asking. But, is he asking them in order to reveal himself, or would he be interested in a listener’s answers? Can anyone who unleashes such a deluge really be curious about all the responses? Or is this a framework for a fundamentally lonely person to try and generate a conversation?

While I find it nearly impossible to believe that anyone has ever actually read the book cover to cover - the interrogation is wearying - it is, nevertheless, a fascinating exercise. If nothing else - as someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time at taps and on barstools discussing innumerable imponderable questions - one would like to grab a beer with the author and quiz him in turn.

Grade: B+

Review of Whalefall: A Novel (Daniel Kraus)

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:01 EST

An imaginative melange of The Great Santini, Pinocchio, and A Monster Calls, this novel is by turns fascinating and annoying. Daniel Kraus’s main inspiration came from a news report about an incident where two kayakers were temporarily sucked into the maw of a humpback whale. He goes deeper - literally - and has his protagonist swallowed whole. During the ensuing struggle to escape, 17-year-old Jay Gardiner confronts his tortured relationship with his father, a legendary diver and sea salt. Everything involving the physiognomy of the whale and the means Jay resorts to in his efforts to get out is spellbinding. Every flashback to his prick of a father - who becomes a kind of spirit guide during the crisis as well - actually drains sympathy from the story.

Jay has ended up in his predicament because, after refusing to go see the estranged father when he was dying of cancer, the boy is diving to try to retrieve the bones left behind in Monterey Bay when his old man killed himself in a dive. Jay believes this will heal his broken relationship with his Mother and sisters and repair his image in the eyes of beach bums who idolized the Dad. For the reader, the suicide is just one more selfish act by a profoundly unpleasant man who was unworthy of this son. We really just don’t care about a reconciliation, even oppose it.

The story is soon to be released as a film and the visuals have the potential to be amazing. But the Jay character has the potential to be so whiny and the father so unlikable that one does not envy the director the job of melding action and emotion, which the book does not quite manage.

Grade: C

Review of 2BR02B (short story) (Kurt Vonnegut)

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:01 EST

Everything was perfectly swell.

There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.

One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.

Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.

X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.

Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.

The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.

2BR02B is a short story, first published in the January 1962 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction. While the title is an obvious allusion to Hamlet’s soliloquy, in the story it refers to the phone number you dial to reach the Federal Bureau of Termination and schedule your death. The setting is a future where ageing has been, if not defeated, at least vastly extended. The trade off that has been made is to keep the population steady by requiring a death for every birth. Thus, to keep his triplets, Edward Wehling has to find three people willing to die.

There is no literary form more distinctly Anglospheric - and pro-life - than dystopian fiction. Every utopia proceeds from the conceit that human reason should enable us to arrange society perfectly. But, since at least Hume, we of the English-speaking world have rejected such Rationalism and, since at least the Bible, have rejected the delusion of human infallibility and accepted that Man is Fallen.

Vonnegut’s story sits comfortably in a long lineage of warnings that Reason is not a reliable guide to structuring our societies and that we must not trust ourselves to wield certain powers of life and death over each other or we will do terrible things, pretending them reasonable.

Grade: A-

Review of The Unquiet Sleep (William Haggard)

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:01 EST

Yes, a corruptive drug. And there were other words too, the whole language of the junky and of those who tried to cope with him – jargon about the needle, withdrawal symptoms, stabilized addicts. To Russell the last was the most frightening of all. It meant a normal life except for reliance on a doctor’s weekly prescription. A normal life! Mecron was supposed to be something between a tranquillizer and a pep pill. You took it and went to sleep; you woke to a febrile activity. You woke to addiction.

An unquiet sleep indeed.

William Haggard’s Colonel Russell spy series is best-remembered today-when remembered at all-for its conservatism. At a time when John Le Carre was writing hand-wringing twaddle about how similar the USSR and the West had become, the good Colonel harbored no such doubts. As in the passage above, the enemies he, and the Security Executive he ran, took on were personal as well as political and there was no question about the morality of the cause. The battle here to prevent the sale and distribution of the addictive wonder drug Mecron is driven by the fact that addiction offends his sensibilities.

The other notable thing about these adventures - 24 in all - is that most of the “action” occurs in the corridors of power. As the author said himself, they are political books, befitting for the former civil servant who wrote them. The plot of Unquiet Sleep is largely driven by the attempt to protect a Cabinet member from scandal, as a Cypriot gang tries to blackmail him into obtaining more Mecron after Russell halts its production.

On the other hand, lest we imagine Haggard some kind of troglodyte, the operative who engages in the book’s actual derring do is a former French Resistance fighter with a false foot, Rachel Borrodaile. The Colonel makes no bones about his admiration for her and her capabilities, which allow him to focus more on lunching at the club with fellow bureaucrats.

It’s a peculiar but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the spy genre.

Grade: B+

Review of The Ballad of Mulan (Unknown Unknown)

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:01 EST

“The Ballad of Mulan,” a 330-word poem about a woman posing as a man to enlist in the military in place of her ailing father, is dated sometime between Wei of the Northern dynasties (386-534) and the Tang dynasty (618-907). Scholars and historians have not been able to settle on its origins or settings. Given that no archaeological evidence corroborates Hua Mulan’s existence, her story may well be folklore.[...]

Since her story first graced the big screen in 1926, the folk heroine has, under different interpretations over the course of a century, come to variously emblematize filial piety, patriotism, feminism and, perhaps inadvertently, cultural commodification. Given that Hua Mulan may not be an actual historical figure, faithfulness has seldom been a point of contention in the reworkings of “The Ballad of Mulan” in every form and medium — including literature, music, dance, theater, martial arts and television, as well as film — as expanding on those 330 words necessitates artistic license.
-The live-action ‘Mulan’ is not the first retelling of the legend. Or the second. Or the sixth. (Martin Tsai, 9/04/20, Washington Post)

This is the big surprise facing the reader who comes to the actual Ballad of Mulan from the Disney version: it is incredibly spare. The second is that it is not a martial tale but an anti-war one. The third, and most disturbing, is that, if there was a historical Mulan, she was-in the apt formulation of one essayist- more Hun than Han.

All this leads to plenty of disagreement about the various iterations of the ballad, which we can maybe avoid by going to the source. Here’s one translation for your perusal: The Ballad of Mulan (Asia for Educators l Columbia University, From The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry, by Han H. Frankel)

Grade: A

Review of The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:01 EST

We finally made it to Disneyland last week and got to experience some of the rides that differ from Disney World. As we were leaving the park we decided to hop on one with a short wait and opted for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which turned out to be pretty demented. It occurred to me that I had probably never read the original book, only Disney story books when I was a kid, based on their film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Long out of copyright, it’s easy enough to find a version of the text on-line or an audio version (see below)

It’s a curious text, a children’s book that’s not necessarily for children. It is no surprise that Disney latched on to Toad, whose mania for going ever faster leads him to buying, and eventually stealing, cars to race around the country in, with predictably disastrous results.

The car stood in the middle of the yard, quite unattended, the stable-helps and other hangers-on being all at their dinner. Toad walked slowly round it, inspecting, criticising, musing deeply. “I wonder,” he said to himself presently, “I wonder if this sort of car starts easily?” Next moment, hardly knowing how it came about, he found he had hold of the handle and was turning it. As the familiar sound broke forth, the old passion seized on Toad and completely mastered him, body and soul. As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver’s seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

While these scenes are comical in their own right, Toad ends up in prison, with his magnificent abandoned home overrun by the weasels and stoats of the Wild Wood. This gets pretty dark and his friends are forced into stern measures to reform him before a battle to retake Toad Hall.

There are also quite beautiful musings about the pleasures of home and of nature. There’s even a famous chapter that is downright mystical: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was sometimes edited out of versions specifically geared towards kids.

All in all, it is a real pleasure to read and richly deserves its status as a classic.

Grade: A+