Amin Maalouf, translated by Catherine Temerson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)

Throughout the 20th century most U.S. citizens went along quite happily without expending a thought to, say, the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. This was of a piece with a general climate of nonchalance about all things foreign. Since 9/11, the days of willful ignorance about the Arab world are gone forever, or at least there is a pretense they are. Now, just when it looked as if more or less everyone, politicians included, was close to getting the Sunni-Shiite thing down, along comes Amin Maalouf with his lovely, complex memoir, Origins, to remind us that Arab identity is as fluid, unsettled and ever-changing as the Mediterranean Sea where it kisses the shores of Lebanon, his country of origin, and France, where he has lived for the last 30 years. Maalouf is one of that small handful of writers, like David Grossman and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are indispensable to us in our current crisis.

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

Michael Meyer (Walker & Company, $25.99)

This summer, widespread Beijing fatigue is an inevitability. But it's high-flying Olympic Beijing that may become overfamiliar - this is not Michael Meyer's town. The Beijing he has called home is being systematically eradicated, and this book is his testament. On Aug. 8, 2005, three years to the day before the Olympics' start date - and exactly 68 years after the Japanese marched in to occupy the city - Meyer moved into a traditional courtyard home in the hutong, the "vanishing backstreets'' of his subtitle. His neighborhood, Dazhalan, is six centuries old and was once known as the entertainment district, full of artisans, acrobats, antiques and brothels. Meyer assumes the role of the lone Westerner among Dazhalan's 57,000-odd residents, which provides entertainment of a distinctly early-21st-century sort: the authentic cultural immersion experience. This August, as we watch athletes gasping for breath in "Bird's Nest'' stadium beneath a gaudy international skyline, Meyer's message will sound especially plangent.

The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal (Doubleday, $27.50)

Reading The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal is like watching a cobra devour forest vermin. Even if you don't have much feeling for the prey, you may pause at the thought of what might happen if the monster turned its attention on you.

Not that Vidal has venom for everyone. There are writers he admires - Edmund Wilson, Dawn Powell and Italo Calvino are the subjects of splendid appreciations. On the whole he seems to find it easier to praise the dead.

He also loves much of Tennessee Williams, who wasn't dead when Vidal set down his thoughts about the playwright's memoirs, though they were no longer the friends they'd once been. Deftly Vidal separates the superb from the lamentable in Williams's work:

"He makes poetic (without quotes) the speech of those half- educated would-be genteel folk who still maintain their babble in his head. Only on those rare occasions when he tries to depict educated or upper-class people does he falter.... But then he is not the sort of writer who sees words on the page; rather he hears them in his head and when he is plugged into the right character, the wrong word never sounds."

A single savory sentence concerning John Updike's memoir "Self-Consciousness'' is enough to convey his malice: "Dental problems occupy many fascinating pages.''

- Tribune wire services