Anthony Shadid (1968–2012)

There are a lots of books out there that tell you about how difficult home construction projects can be, and lots of books about the Middle East, but I'd wager that few are as thoughtful and affecting as "House of Stone." In it, the author, a successful correspondent for the Washington Post and the New York Times describes his attempts to rebuild the elegant house in southern Lebanon that his great-gradfather built around the time that the Ottoman Empire finally fell apart. It contains a lot show more of information about building materials, the architectural traditions of the Middle East, and all of this may be of more or less interest to the average reader, but there's a whole more to "House of Stone" than that.

"House of Stone" is, in many ways, about small-town Middle Eastern life, and maybe about small-town life in general. Marjayoun -- the town that Shadid's extended family calls home -- is a quiet, sleepy place that has been on the wrong side of most of the geopolitical shifts that the region has undergone over the past hundred or so years. It seems to have been in elegant decay for generations. Shadid does a lovely job of describing the town's rhythms -- its linguistic formalities, never-ending schedule of visits and greetings, and complex clan politics. He speaks Arabic and is recognized as more-or-less a citizen of the place, but "House of Stone" is, in a sense, a story of the author discovering what he didn't know about his own culture. He slowly learns when to hurry the laborers he's hired and when to let them to work at his own pace, when to bargain, how much to tell his neighbors, and how to joke with and show respect to the people around him. This is a book that's as much about rediscovery as it is about rebuilding.

The author is clearly fond of his ancestral home, and his descriptions of it and its lush landscape are beautiful and moving. At the same time, he laments that the fact that it seems to be a beautiful, verdant place without much of a future. Things move slowly there: it's almost a miracle when a tradesman shows up on the day that he says that he will. But the town also seems to be full of disappointed people, the descendants of noble families that have been left without much to do. He spends a lot of time smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey, and eating Middle Eastern finger food with people who've made it their principal occupation. The other side of this coin is the few truly excellent people he finds or hears about in his family's old town: a local doctor, now reduced by cancer, who spent his life caring for his patients before dedicating himself to gardening and building musical instruments. He meets tradesmen who faithfully practice arts that are falling into disuse with the eye and patience of real artists. He tells the readers about a few of the town's extremely distinguished, highly educated older residents while also describing the struggles of his immigrant family in frontier Oklahoma and how it made them tough and unsentimental. "House of Stone" is, in some ways, a book about what it means to be a good man. Shadid won a couple of Pulitzers before his too-early death, but he's still not too proud to admit that he sometimes wonders how well he measures up to earlier generations and to some of Marjayoun's current residents. Funnily enough, "House of Stone" also seems to demonstrate that even some of the town's most dissipated, least impressive residents make, in their own way, some small contributions to either the rebuilding of the Shadeed family house or Antony's stay in Marjayoun. The author is, in other words, compassionate toward most everyone he meets.

Lastly, while it'd probably be going a bit too far to call Shadeed a nostalgic, he seems to yearn for a Middle East that existed previous to the First World War in which the inefficient, ecumenical Ottoman Empire enabled the region's various religious and political factions to live together in relative peace. Since he's a returning emigrant himself, the fact that he's a bit of a cosmopolitan isn't particularly surprising, but his analysis effectively shows the ways that the Middle East's current organizing principles -- sectarian politics and post-Sykes-Picot nationalism -- simply aren't working. As a member of an Orthodox Christian minority, he worries that his community lacks what he terms guarantee of survival in the current political environment, and while his criticisms of Israel are muted, as befits a journalist, he also talks to a few people who tell him that the Israeli occupation, unjust as it was, at least managed to bring a measure of stability to the region. As the epilogue written by his widow spells out, he'd witnessed unimaginably awful acts of violence as a journalist and seen the damage that war could do. He'd faced death numerous times himself. One gets the feeling that both his efforts to restore his family's house and to write this book were efforts to impose some order and encourage some healing in a world that had far too little of each. All in all, this book is a lovely, important, and, in many ways, deeply melancholy read. show less

I got the book after a heart-breaking interview with Nada, Shadid's widow. I'm happy I read it and knowing that Shadid had passed away, passages where he describes looking forward to living in the rebuilt house with his children are truly touching. I'm also conflicted about this book as some parts of it greatly annoyed me as well.
On the one hand, the writing is beautiful, the characters are compelling, you feel a real sense of love and admiration for this part of Lebanon (and the Levant in show more general). The stories from his family's emigration are beautiful and compelling and work great intermingled with the stories of the rebuilding of his ancestral house (that are always funny and touching).
On the other hand, it is terribly biased. For someone who doesn't know much of the region and its history (and I'm going to guess that's a majority of the readership), you'd think that what completely ruined Lebanon is Israel; not Syrian intervention, not the decades of civil war and sectarianism, not the fact that the whole south of the country is an enclave to itself that the government cannot control. I don't agree with many many things that Israel does. Israel faces its own traumas from its terribly misguided intervention in the Lebanese mess and has much to answer for, but Shadid keeps coming back to Palestine this and Palestine that again and again. Is this a book about Lebanon or about how bad Israel is? In the end, I think it's sad when a country has to look back to a totally corrupt Ottoman empire to define its 'golden age' of tolerance, as Shadid does. What kind of future does a country have when its people keep leaving or looking only back? show less

American journalist Anthony Shadid covered the war in Lebanon in 2006. At the end of the conflict, Shadid visited his ancestral home in Marjayoun, a town in southern Lebanon. There he found his great-grandfather's house, empty, with a partially exploded Israeli rocket in the top floor. Some combination of nostalgia for his family's past and a desire to anchor himself to the present motivated Shadid to take on the task of rebuilding his ancestral home. He took a leave of absence from his show more newspaper and spent a year in Lebanon overseeing the project. His memoir describes the home's reconstruction, as well as the people he encountered in the process. Stories of Shadid's great-grandfather, who built the house, and his grandmother, who was sent to America at age 12, are interspersed throughout the book.

Shadid goes into great detail about the men hired to work on the home and the materials used in the construction project. This is the weakest part of the book, mainly because there are no accompanying illustrations - no before and after photos, no close-ups of the architectural features Shadid describes, no photos of the garden and the variety of trees and plants he placed there.

The best parts of the book describe the residents of Marjayoun, the emigrants who left there, the history of Lebanon from the closing years of the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon's religious and political climate, and Shadid's family history. I also felt the lack of illustrations in the sections about Shadid's ancestors. He described photographs he had seen of his ancestors. I would have loved to have seen at least one or two of those photographs so that I would have had faces to put with the individuals brought back from the past in this book.

When I Googled for pictures of the house, I discovered that Shadid died unexpectedly shortly after completing the book. Knowing that he had so little time to establish a home in the restored house added a sense of poignancy to my reading. Shadid left two children behind. This book won't make up for growing up without their father, but it will at least help them to know him and something of their heritage. show less

Shadid is a reporter for the Washington Post and is Arab-American (he passes in Iraq for a native Arab). He was stationed in Iraq from before the war to the elections in 2005. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his reporting. Because he is Arab and speaks the language he is able to easily interview people in all stations and positions of life in Iraq and provide a unique introspection of the Iraqi people. Shadid is there in person as the major events happen, interviewing people, watching show more as the zeitgeist mood of the country changes over time with each major event in the war, occupation and resistance.

What we learn from the book is that America is clueless about Iraq. We also learn the Iraqis are mostly clueless themselves. There are countless factions pushing and pulling in all directions, both internally and externally, with each car bombing a game to guess who might have done it and why. Iraqis are fiercely independent people, they operate according to tribal law and blood feuds (the politics of revenge), who see America as a provocative threat to their identity, and Saddam as the source of all their problems. We learn that Iraq has been a living hell since the early 1980s when the Iran/Iraq war killed more than WWI/WWII combined (on a per-capita basis) leaving a culture of death and crime in its wake. That long-repressed religious forces have fused with nationalistic pride to form militaristic religious armies. Of external Islamic movements twisting Iraq to their purposes. Of tribal conflict, sectarian conflicts, inter and intra-family conflicts.

I found this an emotionally difficult but required book. It is as close to a history of Iraq post-invasion as there can be right now, it is all first-hand accounts from Iraqis themselves, written by a reporter sympathetic and understanding of Iraqi culture. Once you get into the mind of Iraqi culture you realize how little the outside world understand this highly complex and volatile "country". At the very end of the last page of the Bibliography, stuffed with Middle East books, is one book that stands out but speaks volumes: Native Son. If you understand Native Son, you are a long way to understanding Iraq, "there's a little Bigger in us all." show less