LEONARD WOOLF
Victoria Glendinning

Leonard Woolf was Virginia’s widower for almost as long as he had been her husband. He lived until 1969, long enough to see the Bloomsbury circle of his youth become an academic industry. Much of his last years were occupied with publishing his wife’s papers, selling her letters to libraries, meeting with or gently putting off biographers. By the time he died, at the age of 88, he knew that he would not be remembered for the decades he spent advising Labor Party committees, researching social problems for the Fabian Society, writing long books on international relations, or editing and writing for magazines. What posterity thanks him for, instead, is his devotion to Virginia Woolf, to whom he sacrificed many of his career prospects and nearly all of his sexuality. Turn to almost any page of Victoria Glendinning’s entertaining and sensible new biography, “Leonard Woolf,” and you are likely to find an encomium to this intelligent, benevolent, hard-working, ill-remembered man.

— Adam Kirsch (November 22)

THE LAY OF THE LAND
Richard Ford

“The Lay of the Land” is a great American novel that never resorts to paranoid hyperbole or beatific road-running. Richard Ford’s long-time protagonist Frank Bascombe, the seasoned salesman and the worn-out husband, is happy just to be a neutral observer. Mr. Ford’s novel is a huge book, and like many epics can be too episodic. Not deeply moving, it at least convinces the reader that its picture of America is real and will do all of us a service, like the time capsule Bascombe’s son Paul buries at its end, near the beach.

— Benjamin Lytal (November 8)

AMONG THE RIGHTEOUS
Robert Satloff

Robert Satloff reports in his new book on the Holocaust’s reach into Arab lands. Holocaust “minimization,” if not outright denial, is pervasive and officially blessed in Arab press, scholarship, and political discourse. State-run newspapers in Egypt repeatedly undermine the reality of the Holocaust by challenging the number of Jews who died in Hitler’s genocidal campaign and by equating “Nazism” with “Zionism.” Mr. Satloff, who heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says he wrote “Among the Righteous” to answer a narrow question: “Did any Arabs save any Jews during the Holocaust?” Was there, he asks, a Muslim Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by, among other ruses, providing them with Swedish passports? Or an Arab Oskar Schindler? Mr. Satloff concludes that the record of Middle Eastern Arabs towards the Jews is not unlike that of Europeans.

— Judith Miller (November 8)