VICTORIA GLENDINNING
Leonard Woolf

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, hardworking, ill-remembered man.

– Adam Kirsch

DANIEL KEHLMANN
Measuring the World

Daniel Kehlmann’s crowd-pleaser about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who laid the foundation for number theory, and about Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the famous naturalist, comes as a long-distance treat, like imported chocolate. Mr. Kehlmann, an Austrian who has published six books since his birth in 1975, tells the parallel stories of Gauss and of Humboldt as if they were everymen, exemplary for the trouble they encounter while leading their lives. “Measuring the World” compares with Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet,” in which two men set out to programmatically investigate the nature of the world but succeed only in frustrating themselves. Not a rigorous book, perhaps, Mr. Kehlmann’s novel can be heartily recommended. It is a light book that makes you feel smart.

– Benjamin Lytal

ROBERT SATLOFF
Among the Righteous

Robert Satloff reports in his important 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, which has made peace with Israel, 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, a historian and expert on modern Arab affairs, 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

VIKRAM CHANDRA
Sacred Games

Storytelling is as old as India. The anonymous animal fables of the “Panchatantra” were committed to writing in the 6th century but come from much earlier, unwritten sources. Even the sophisticated Somadeva, court poet to Queen Suryamati in 11th-century Kashmir, compiled his colossal “Ocean of Rivers of Stories” (the English translation of which occupies 10 thick volumes) on the basis of tales whose origins are lost in time.

Vikram Chandra uses such ancient devices to bind his ultramodern narrative together. The novel opens with the spiteful killing of a white Pomeranian named Fluffy. Ostensibly a detective novel, in which a lurid panoply of murders unfurl in gruesome detail, “Sacred Games,” despite its length, is compulsively readable. Clever as the plot and sub-plots are, the characters carry the narrative. The detective Sartaj Singh is wonderfully realized, as is his gangster antagonist. But the other personages, from Parulkar, Singh’s corrupt superior, to Zoya Mirza, the rising Bollywood star, to the sinister swami Shridhar Shukla, along with a dozen others, change and deepen as the novel unwinds.

– Eric Ormsby

FREDERICK SEIDEL
Ooga-Booga

Who is the best American poet writing today? Though the news will not be welcome to prize juries, literary philanthropists, and the people who choose the poems for the subway, I think it may be Frederick Seidel. There is a reason why Mr. Seidel, whose first book was published more than 40 years ago, has not accumulated the cargo of honors that turn so many poets his age into mere worthies: no Pulitzer, no National Book Award.

No American poet since James Merrill has written about such a materially privileged existence. But in Merrill’s verse, wealth is mainly kept in the background, the upholstery that cushions the poet’s idealistic pursuit of beauty. It is not clear just where Mr. Seidel’s money comes from, but he does not write about it in the delicately aristocratic style of the heir to the Merrill Lynch millions. Instead, he turns his luxuries into dark fetishes, none more so than the Ducati motorcycles he loves to ride. Several poems in “Ooga-Booga” are about a “Superbike” he is having custom-made at the Ducati factory in Bologna. This would seem self-indulgent, were Mr. Seidel not able to make his poems as erotically reckless as the bike itself.

– Adam Kirsch