DISCOVERIES

The Belt

Ahmed Abodehman

Translated from the French

by Nadia Benabid

Ruminator Books: 149 pp., $22

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There is so much of the world we don’t understand. Newspapers tell one story, novels another and memoirs a third. Ahmed Abodehman, 53, grew up in the mountains of Saudi Arabia, where he was a member of the Kahtani tribe. When he was very young, Abodehman was nicknamed village poet, but it was not until he had moved to Paris that he wrote this memoir. “The Belt” is full of mountain lore, strange and spicy smells, shining daggers and rifts between generations as the old warn against the incursions of the new: first a health clinic, then a school.

In the village, he is expected to participate in rituals that prove his courage and readiness for manhood. But in school, he writes, “we were simply children, no more, no less. There, courage was understood to mean something like authority and vulnerability and warmth and intelligence. There, it was absolutely forbidden to carry a knife.” One of the elders of the village, Hizam, tells Abodehman that the world’s first poem came from their village: “In the beginning it came as a plant, a plant awash in a thousand shades of color, each color fragrant with a thousand scents and each scent enclosing a thousand souls.” Why must this side of life be traded for the future? The boy wonders, and we must as well.

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The Skating Pond

Deborah Joy Corey

Berkeley Publishing Group:

246 pp., $21.95

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Stonington, Maine, is wild and beautiful proof that village life still exists in America. “The Skating Pond” is set there, in that close harbor; the year is 1968, the narrator a 14-year-old girl, Elizabeth. Her father is a dour painter of depressing landscapes and fishing boats. Her mother expresses herself in her ice skating, until one winter at the rink where she skates she is accidentally struck by a hockey puck. Her beautiful face is disfigured so badly that she will no longer go outside. It is not long before her father leaves for another woman, and Elizabeth is left to care for her mother. When her mother dies, Elizabeth wobbles between relationships -- one with the boy whose puck changed her life, another with a much older architect -- and she stumbles into adulthood haunted by her mother. These lives are so large and so deep, scar layered upon scar, generation to generation; their secrets badly protected, their proximity to death, it seems, closer than for those of us in urban areas.

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Coal

A Human History

Barbara Freese

Perseus: 308 pp., $22.95

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Perhaps there is another way to tell the story of coal, Barbara Freese gamely suggests at one point; a hopeful tale of a lesson well learned about a “primitive fuel” that led us to technological greatness. But the story Freese tells is grim. Without coal, “[t]he mainly agrarian world would have stayed in place for decades or centuries longer, with slower technological progress, less material wealth, and more gradual social change.” The shift from farming to manufacturing in England, the United States and China led irrevocably to pollution, death and hierarchical societies with poorly distributed wealth. “Like a genie,” Freese warns in the book’s beginning, “coal has an unpredictable and threatening side.” What began in the 16th century as a way to stay warm became, with the help of the steam engine and the railroads, a hazardous substance. Coal mining, child labor in the mines, black lung, “smoke depression,” sulfur dioxide poisoning and acid rain leave a dubious legacy. To this day, coal pollution kills “many thousands of people per year in the U.S. alone,” Freese writes.

Two images from the book dominate the reader’s imagination: One is a picture of Pittsburgh, taken in 1913 at 3 p.m., in which the street lamps must be lighted in the pitch blackness. The other is a phrase used by Ralph Waldo Emerson to describe the effect of coal on humanity: “a portable climate,” a device we may well need after the global warming it has caused has ruined the one we now depend upon.