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This is a well researched tale...full of human interest and historically accurate. You feel the impending doom in every small detail.

If you enjoy historical fiction based upon disease and science, this book is for you! An Imperfect Lens is appropriately titled to refer to scientists' unsuccessful attempt in 1883 to identify the source of a cholera epidemic and find a cure with the backdrop of a problematic love story between an intelligent jewish girl and one of the scientists.

This story is set in 1883 Alexandria Egypt, and a cholera epidemic has broken out. The people, especially the poor, do not know what is causing the swift, painful, and gruesome deaths all around them. Being terrified and paranoid, they and begin to form all kinds of conspiracy theories as well as turning to god for answers regarding how the disease is transmitted. The wealthy, for the most part, are being spared, and the Committee of Public Safety only counts "european deaths" in their death statistics. Hence, the insignificance of the vast majority of the poor inhabitants are ignored, until the epidemic starts to reach the wealthy as well. So much for the common good.

Interspersed throughout the book are real life accounts from doctors and scientists from all over the globe that date back to 30AD of cholera outbreaks. Cholera begins its life and breeds in oceans and water. When microbes arrive on shores with sewerage and large dense populations, a perfect breeding ground exists and cholera spreads by clinging to moisture, and infecting and killing anyone who comes into contact with it.

During this time period, France and Germany are competing on the world stage to discover the origin of the cholera epidemic and its cure. Louis Pasteur from France sends three scientists to Egypt in 1883 to find the cause of cholera during an outbreak, and Germany sends Dr. Koch, who discovered the cause of tuberculosis. All scientists meet with Dr. Malina, a respected jewish doctor whose family has lived in Alexandria for many generations and has a beautiful and intelligent daughter. Este longs to travel and marry a poet, but as the story unfolds, she finds herself helping in the lab and falling in love with Louis Thuillier, one of the French doctors who is not jewish. Simultaneously, religious, cultural, and political problems arise for Este and her family and they need to flee their home as the epidemic abates, and ironically as Thuillier becomes one of the last people to succumb to the epidemic.

If you enjoy historical fiction books such as Moloka'i by Ann Bennert, Outbreak by Robin Cook, or Hot Zone by Douglas Preston, you will enjoy this book.

An Imperfect Lens is atmospheric tale set in Alexandra, Egypt in 1883; the main character a lethal disease, cholera: ''unseen pulsing crescent moonshapes," that are steadily breeding in the exposed sewage, killing the city's poor, gradually finding its way into the houses of the rich. Feeding in the stomachs of the innocent, death is almost instantaneous - a sharp pain in the stomach, lips tinged with blue, a loss of bowel control, the body shriveled, turned grey like slate.

Paranoia is rife; the wealthy see it as a sign of the city's drinking and lack of morality, the less fortunate see it as a mark of God's will, a way for the rich to rid the city of an unwanted population. How is the disease transmitted? By air or bird droppings, or perhaps even food. People are instructed to always rinse their hands, and never eat unwashed food from market stalls. But the microbes continue to spread, on the edges of bed linen, on the shoes of unsuspecting servants, splashing in the city's puddles, streams and open sewers, on the surface of fruit, the edges of plates and cutlery.

Three Chemists from Paris - Louis Thuilliers, Emile Roux and veterinarian Edmond Nocard - are dispatched directly from the laboratories of famous scientist Louis Pasteur to Alexandra, hoping to isolate the microbe. The sights, sounds and smells of this exotic city, immediately seduce the idealistic Louis. Almost at once, he falls for Este Malina, the daughter of the City's Jewish doctor, who is the verge of being engaged when Louis meets her at dinner at the French consulate's home.

Este, bored with her life, begins to help out in the laboratory, awakening to the possibility of a career in the sciences, with Louis at her side. She hopes to marry her paramour, but her imminent engagement and Louis's humble background irrevocably stands between them. Her religion also is a barrier, with her father and his wife, considering the Jewish faith so much more than just a faith "but a cord that inevitably binds them."

Louis and Este's love affair plays out against a cholera epidemic that pressingly evades the lens of the scientists and the city's authorities. The other characters are equally caught in this stew of city waste, men with their own personal demons and small enjoyments: There's Eric Fortman, an Englishman from Liverpool, a good salesman and a sturdy traveler, determined to start a new life in Alexandra as an importer and a businessman, a type of reinvented merchant prince who can slip money into the right hands at the right time.

And there's Marcus, Louis's rebellious young assistant, who one night beneath the boardwalk, witnesses Masika, a hotel maid, succumb to the disease: "pools of fecal liquid gathering by her hips, the illness taking over her body like a colonial power, killing everything in its way."

The lives of the main protagonists, however, are diminished in the light of author Anne Rophie's harrowing and exquisitely wrought descriptions of a city on the brink, where in the bazaar, the olive pits and the splashes of wine and overripe fruit mingle on the cobblestones with the blood of slaughtered animals. Children with their hands out, crouching in doorways, flies stuck to their encrusted eyelids. The heavy sweat of the day, the dust in which all these things are stirred, and a young boy who suddenly becomes ill and violently dies, "the contents of his bowls flowing over the mud of the stone curb."

Rophie's Alexandria is historically accurate, with cholera not simply content to attack the intestines of its victim, but ravage pocketbooks of the entire town, spreading hunger and despair, sending thousands to pray and others to shut themselves up in their rooms. Her characters are young and impulsive, overwhelmed by idealism, yet torn apart and frustrated by their inability to fight this terrible disease, caught up in a race, where everything they try proves useless.

An Imperfect Lens is not an easy book to read, and it's depictions of the epidemic are unflinching in their detail. Yet it shows that the war between man and bacteria is endless and constantly changing and is never won entirely, by one side or the other. The story is a timely reminder of the importance of research and science in a world where everyone needs to understand that things must be proved and evidence given, so that human life can be saved and that hopefully all disease can be defeated. Mike Leonard April 06.