Short Takes

An Imperfect Lens
By Anne Roiphe
Shaye Areheart, 296 pp., $25

In a striking departure, Anne Roiphe, so closely associated in both her fiction and nonfiction with the concerns of contemporary American women, follows her imagination to another place altogether in this vivid historical novel.

The setting is Alexandria, Egypt, in 1883. Louis Pasteur, too old to make the trip himself, dispatches a team of associates to the fabled port to try to identify the cholera microbe that is spreading insidiously in the seeping filth of the city's bazaars and alleyways. On their arrival, the French researchers are welcomed by the gracious Dr. Abraham Malina, his wife, and his beautiful daughter, Este, members of Alexandria's Jewish haute bourgeoisie. At the same time, another threat, equally insidious, is bearing down on the Malinas -- the anti-Semitism of the British colonial authorities -- in a perfect storm of dramatic turmoil.

Roiphe flirts with, and occasionally succumbs to, purple prose as she tracks the cruel advance of the epidemic, though to give praise where it is due, she succeeds in making romantic fiction out of material that ranges from the intractable (disease vectors) to the actively off-putting. Like lovely Este, we find ourselves falling for the valiant scientists who risk their lives to save others', which is Roiphe's intention precisely.

My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood
By Christine Rosen
PublicAffairs, 232 pp., $24

The author's parents had no spiritual reason for sending their daughters to Keswick Christian School. For them, down-at-heels Keswick mainly offered an affordable private alternative to the public schools of St. Petersburg, Fla., where Christine Rosen was born and raised.

With few other educational resources at hand -- or desired -- fundamentalist Keswick taught its students the Bible. It was their textbook, their storybook, their songbook. Competitions were built around it. Encased in a ''Bible cozy" with little handles attached, it even made a popular fashion accessory. Christine, an assiduous student eager to please, absorbed its lessons intently. She never doubted the message. But as she reached double digits, she developed a certain skepticism toward the messengers.

What an interesting childhood you must have had, we can almost hear well-meaning friends tell her. You ought to write about it. And she has, as dutifully and as earnestly as she studied her Bible 30 years ago. Eventually, it seems, she decided that it was better to engage with the world than to wall it off behind battlements of piety. That more interesting and more self-revealing story, however, goes untold.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Norton, 196 pp., $23.95

''In the wake of 9/11," writes Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, ''there has been a lot of fretful discussion about the divide between 'us' and 'them.' " This view is ''thoughtful, well worked out. . . . And, I think, wrong." In this gentle call to unity, Appiah proposes a different worldview, cosmopolitanism, which may sound like a fashion trend but in fact is a philosophical tradition dating back to ancient Greece.

Appiah, born to a Ghanaian father and a British mother, has not just intellectual but personal reasons for thinking that the meeting of cultures need not always be perceived as a clash. Most people have values; we simply define them differently, or give them different weights. The cosmopolitan citizen, whether of a community or of the world, puts himself into the other's shoes, tries to understand the other's moral dialect, a more constructive approach than declaring war, whether metaphorical or literal.

Appiah writes reasonably, persuasively, and with winning charm. Though it may be as inaccessible as a fairy-tale kingdom, the world of sweetness and light he recommends sounds like a much nicer place than the world of insularity and conflict we seem to be stuck with.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.