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Summary
Summary
"Evocative and beautifully written, House of Stone . . . should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the agonies and hopes of the Middle East." -- Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate
"In rebuilding his family home in southern Lebanon, Shadid commits an extraordinarily generous act of restoration for his wounded land, and for us all." -- Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey
In spring 2011, Anthony Shadid was one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya, cuffed and beaten, as that country was seized by revolution. When he was freed, he went home. Not to Boston or Beirut--where he lives-- or to Oklahoma City, where his Lebanese-American family had settled and where he was raised. Instead, he returned to his great-grandfather's estate, a house that, over three years earlier, Shadid had begun to rebuild.
House of Stone is the story of a battle-scarred home and a war correspondent's jostled spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. In this poignant and resonant memoir, the author of the award-winning Night Draws Near creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house's renewal alongside his family's flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. In the process, Shadid memorializes a lost world, documents the shifting Middle East, and provides profound insights into this volatile landscape. House of Stone is an unforgettable meditation on war, exile, rebirth, and the universal yearning for home.
Author Notes
Anthony Shadid was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on September 26, 1968. He received a bachelor's degree in political science and journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. He worked at several newspapers during his lifetime including The Associated Press, The Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. In 2010, he and three other New York Times journalists were kidnapped in Libya by Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi's forces. They were held for six days and beaten before being released. He won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2010 for work he did while at The Washington Post. The New York Times nominated him, along with a team of his colleagues, for the 2012 Pulitzer in international reporting.
He also was the author of Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam; Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War; and House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East. He died from an asthma attack on February 16, 2012 at the age of 43.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shadid-a New York Times correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner, and grandson of immigrants- took a leave of absence to renovate his ancestral home in Lebanon. Shadid's "quixotic mission" was a search for identity. His great-grandfather left the house to his family to "join us with the past, to sustain us." Shadid went in search of that past, claiming, "I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one." He writes sentimentally of Lebanon, but his confession that the house was "memories of what I had imagined over many years" reveal a constructed emotion. The sentimentality sometimes borders on maudlin, and his identity quest is often lost among mundane construction details. Shadid claims to understand the "desire of those whose place had been taken away." He is presumably referring to his divorce, but his home renovation doesn't convince as healing process. History buffs, however, will appreciate the family and Middle Eastern historical asides. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Shadid is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the grandson of Lebanese immigrants. After reporting on various conflicts in the Middle East, he took an extended leave of absence to restore his family's ancestral home in Marjayoun, located in southern Lebanon. The effort was clearly an attempt to reconnect with or rediscover his family's past, and he uses the rebuilding of the home as a metaphor for that search. Shadid describes the town of Marjayoun in his great-grandfather's time in idyllic terms, where Christians and Muslims lived in relative harmony against a background of flourishing agriculture and physical beauty, dominated by the majestic peak of Mount Hermon. His memoir is well written and deeply felt, but his sentimentality sometimes seems over the top and his frequent jumps from past to present can be confusing. Still, this is an interesting and often emotionally stirring account of Shadid's search for a time and place that are irrevocably lost.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANTHONY SHADID, who died in February at the age of 43 while reporting the crisis in Syria, was one of the most intelligent, experienced and well-informed journalists covering the Middle East. In his writing, he showed a depth of intellectual inquiry and a skepticism toward conventional wisdom matched by few other correspondents. In 2006, Shadid visited the abandoned house of his great-grandfather in Marjayoun, a largely Christian town in southern Lebanon that, after a century of wars, was battered and decayed, and was cut off from its natural hinterland by the Israeli and Syrian frontiers. A few months later he returned to find that the upper story of the house had been hit by a half-exploded Israeli rocket. In a defiant gesture to show that the house, "whatever its condition, remained a home worth care," he bought a small olive tree for $4 and planted it near the wrecked building. The following year Shadid came to live in Marjayoun. Both sides of his family, the Shadids and the Samaras, had come from the town, and had immigrated to Oklahoma at the beginning of the 20th century. Against the advice of local friends, and in a country on the verge of renewed civil war, Shadid decided to assemble a work force and rebuild his old family home. The main narrative of "House of Stone" concerns the rebuilding of the house. Interwoven with this is Shadid's account of his ancestors and their world, which in the modern era would become Lebanon, Syria and Israel. A third theme revolves around the migration of different members of Shadid's family, and how they reestablished their lives in the United States. Shadid is scarcely the first person to use the rebuilding of a house as a way of portraying a local community. Such descriptions can be shallow and patronizing, with an emphasis on quirky but likable local characters and semicomic situations. Fortunately, Shadid was too good a reporter to sentimentalize his material, and his acquaintances in Marjayoun, along with artisans he hires, are presented as generally unsympathetic personalities. "Some suspected that I was fabulously wealthy," Shadid writes. "Others deemed me truly, even dangerously insane." Many simply believed he was a spy in deep cover. Shadid comes across here as determined and perceptive, yet scarred by his years as a wandering war correspondent. His project in Marjayoun began after the collapse of his first marriage in 2006. "The battles with my wife had been accelerating for what seemed like ages," he says. "My daughter's mother had been understandably obsessed with the lethal aspects of my career since March 2002, when I was shot by an Israeli sniper in Ramallah." As a correspondent for The Washington Post (he later switched to The New York Times, for which he was working when he died), Shadid lived in Iraq for several years, and won praise for intrepidity and sensitivity to what ordinary Iraqis were saying and doing. He came to understand the shortcomings of war reporting: "Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact, particularly if the results are subtle and occur or become obvious after the cameras and reporters with their notebooks have left." Misgivings like these impelled Shadid to turn with relief to the world of Isber Samara, his maternal great-grandfather, who had died in 1928. It was Isber who originally built the "house of stone" just after World War I. The money to do so came from selling grain to the Turks during the famine that devastated Lebanon as a result of the Allied blockade. Shadid describes how in later years "one of the children, long grown, would recall with a bittersweet expression . . . gold pieces piled as high as a hill in the family's sitting room, glowing in the light of dusk." Shadid writes lyrically about the slow, elegant pace of his family's life in their new house, as they enjoyed their balcony view of the shifting greens of the Litani valley, overlooked by Mount Hermon. What Shadid also shows is how dangerous such a life could be in the last years of the Ottoman Empire (a regime that receives rather too good a press these days for benign rule and tolerance toward minorities). It was a desperate search for security that drove Lebanese like Shadid's ancestors to emigrate to America, where they frequently became peddlers or opened grocery stores. TODAY, the people of Marjayoun, trapped in the far southeast corner of Lebanon within sight of the Israeli border, live in the remains of what was once a bustling trading town. The new frontiers that began to be established in the wake of World War I ushered in its decline. Over the last 100 years, the population fell from 3,752 to about 800. Its current inhabitants endlessly lament the decline, but even so, they turned furiously on Shadid when he wrote an article accurately stating that "picturesque as it is, Marjayoun is dying." The rebuilding of Isber's ruined house seems to be a heroically quixotic venture, taken up after years of abandonment and looting, and in defiance of the cynicism of the townspeople. Shadid himself owned only a small share in his home, yet it was left to him to repair the damage inflicted by previous occupants. The last one, an Israeli informer who fled with the Israelis in 2000, had converted the water cistern into a cesspit that Shadid had to clean out. Even when Shadid could find competent artisans to do the work, they proved difficult to deal with. Not all the details of Shadid's struggle to reconstruct his house are gripping, but he certainly captures the flavor of living in modern Lebanon as he relates his battle to obtain the right type of antique tile or the problems of growing and preserving olives. And though Shadid's building project was ultimately successful, his account nevertheless leaves a somewhat sour taste. True, the tales of practical difficulties overcome are uplifting, but most of the people in the book appear to be self-regarding and self-indulgent, tediously complaining about their lives. Among the few admirable characters is Dr. Khairalla Mady, a former hospital administrator who is dying of cancer and makes stringed instruments like ouds as a hobby. When the Israelis departed and he was accused by Shiite militiamen of being a collaborator, only one person in Marjayoun was willing to support him publicly. The long-suffering, tolerant doctor felt betrayed. When Shadid suggests that the townspeople were frightened, he responds bitterly: "They're not afraid. They're cowards. This is their mentality. They look solely after their interests." Stories like these are illuminating, but there is a problem in the way they are strung together. Descriptions of building the house break off for a look at what happened a century earlier in Lebanon or in Oklahoma a little later. The book would be easier to read if it had a more chronological format and was less a mosaic of barely connected episodes. Even so, it offers a powerful reminder of the impact that never-ending insecurity has on people long after the violence that ruined their lives has been forgotten by the rest of the world. Shadid pursued his project against the advice of friends and in a country near civil war. Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His latest book, written with Henry Cockburn, is "Henry's Demons: A Father and Son's Journey Out of Madness."
Kirkus Review
Washington Post covering the Israeli attack in Lebanon in 2006, Pulitzer winner Shadid (Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, 2005, etc.), the child of Lebanese Americans who grew up in America, painfully encountered the home of his Lebanese ancestors in the town of Marjayoun. It was a once-fine house that had been long abandoned and was hit by an Israeli rocket. The author then resolved to take a furlough from his newspaper and reconstruct the house, which had belonged to his great-grandfather and where his grandmother had spent her first 12 years before the family migrated to America. Shadid traces the two sides of his family that converged at the end of the 19th century in Marjayoun, the Samaras and the Shadids, whose subsequent migrations reflect the strife among the Syrian Lebanese Shiite community with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Suffering from his own divorce and separation from his small daughter, Shadid was often overcome by the "history of departures" witnessed by the house, the ruptures caused by loss and discord among the community of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and the tightly knit customs and rituals that kept things running. Shadid's year became occupied with finding permission to build, securing willing contractors and artisans and befriending sympathetic characters among the often hostile, suspicious townspeople. Much of the narrative is a gentle unfolding of observation and insight, as the author reacquaints himself with the Arabic rhythms, "absorbing beauties, and documenting what was no more." A complicated, elegiac, beautiful attempt to reconcile the physical bayt (home) and the spiritual.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Following the end of his marriage and an assignment covering the Iraq War, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Shadid (who died earlier this year at the age of 43) relocated to Lebanon to restore his great-grandfather's house. Shadid's blend of anecdote, family history, and regional politics creates a beautiful exploration of the meaning of home in an age of conflict. Narrator Neil Shah's strong pacing and precise pronunciation add to the journalistic tone. VERDICT Listeners with interests in the Middle East and Shadid's war reporting will appreciate this audiobook. [The Houghton Harcourt hc was a New York Times best seller.-Ed.]-Amy Koester, St. Charles City-Cty. Lib., Wentzville, MO (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.