""This book reflects my fascination with the many roles that sisters play in women's lives,"" Barbara Alpert says in her introduction to No Friend Like a Sister: A Celebration in Words and Memories. Alpert gathered these sisterly comments from her interviews of sisters and from literary and historical sources, tracing a picture of sisterhood through the ages. She gives sisterless outsiders, of whom she is one, a feeling of what that special and sometimes mysterious bond can be.