“Wonderful . . . One of the finest memoirs I’ve read.” — Philip Caputo, Washington Post
In the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family’s ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather’s once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.
So begins the story of a battle-scarred home and a journalist’s wounded spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. In this bittersweet and resonant memoir, Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house’s renewal alongside the history of his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America around the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, he memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into a shifting Middle East. This paperback edition includes an afterword by the journalist Nada Bakri, Anthony Shadid’s wife, reflecting on his legacy.
“A poignant dedication to family, to home, and to history . . . Breathtaking.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Entertaining, informative, and deeply moving . . . House of Stone will stand a long time, for those fortunate enough to read it.” — Telegraph (London)
“Wonderful . . . One of the finest memoirs I’ve read.” — Philip Caputo, Washington Post
In the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family’s ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather’s once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.
So begins the story of a battle-scarred home and a journalist’s wounded spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. In this bittersweet and resonant memoir, Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house’s renewal alongside the history of his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America around the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, he memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into a shifting Middle East. This paperback edition includes an afterword by the journalist Nada Bakri, Anthony Shadid’s wife, reflecting on his legacy.
“A poignant dedication to family, to home, and to history . . . Breathtaking.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Entertaining, informative, and deeply moving . . . House of Stone will stand a long time, for those fortunate enough to read it.” — Telegraph (London)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is not just the Arab world’s Year in Provence. It is as if Shadid has combined the breakthrough effects of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake into one enormously likeable book. It is a masterpiece." — John Freeman, Boston Globe
"Elegiac, heartbreaking . . . A book conceived as an introspective project of personal recovery — as well as a meditation on politics, identity, craft, and beauty in the Levant — now stands as a memorial. It is a fitting one because of the writing skill and deep feeling [Shadid] unobtrusively displays." — Steve Coll, New York Times
"An apt testament — a moving contemplation of how the dead stay with us, and how war scrambles the narrative of family life." — The New Yorker
"Profound, insightful, tragic, and funny . . . There is not space here to sell out all of this book’s many rewards . . . The prose is ripe, the biblical landscapes vividly rendered." — Telegraph (London)
"Shadid’s great skill as a journalist was that of a master storyteller, and he’s never been more effective than in his final book." — Bookforum
"An honest-to-god, hands-down, undeniable and instant classic . . . written with levity and candor and lyricism that makes the book, improbably, both a compulsive read and one you don’t want to end." — Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King
From the Back Cover
Wonderful . . . One of the finest memoirs I ve read. Philip Caputo, "Washington Post"
In the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family s ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather s once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.
So begins the story of a battle-scarred home and a journalist s wounded spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. In this bittersweet and resonant memoir, Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house s renewal alongside the history of his family s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America around the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, he memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into a shifting Middle East. This paperback edition includes an afterword by the journalist Nada Bakri, Anthony Shadid s wife, reflecting on his legacy.
A poignant dedication to family, to home, and to history . . . Breathtaking. "San Francisco Chronicle"
Entertaining, informative, and deeply moving . . . House of Stone will stand a long time, for those fortunate enough to read it. "Telegraph "(London)
ANTHONY SHADID (1968 2012), author of Night Draws Near and Legacy of the Prophet, gained attention and awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, for his front-page reports in the Washington Post from Iraq and for his work as Middle East correspondent for the New York Times. Tragically, on February 16, 2012, he died while on assignment in Syria.
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Product details
Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (February 5, 2013)
Language: : English
Paperback : 336 pages
ISBN-10 : 0544002199
ISBN-13 : 978-0544002197
Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.52 x 0.84 x 8.28 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #213,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#7 in Lebanon Travel Guides
#49 in General Middle East Travel Guides
#169 in Historical Middle East Biographies
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Hussain Abdul-Hussain
5.0 out of 5 stars Why the Arab obsession with home?Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2012
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America celebrates immigration. Over the past few centuries, almost everyone who has moved here has found it welcoming, has had little trouble integrating, and - over a fairly short period of time - has found it inviting to call the country home. But not for the late New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid.
Born and raised in Oklahoma to second-generation Lebanese-American parents, Shadid was attracted to a different world, one that is not only thousands of miles away, but one hundred years back. In his House of Stone, Shadid described a "project" that he had undertaken. He moved back to his ancestral homeland in Marjayoun, south of Lebanon, and started renovating the long-vacant house of Isber Samara, his great grandfather.
"My family wasn't here," he wrote. "They had shown little interest in my project." Shadid said that on those occasions when he spoke to his daughter, Leila, she asked him what he was doing so far away, to which he answered: "Rebuilding our home." Shadid dreamt "of the day [he] would bring her... to a house she could call hers."
But why was Shadid exactly looking for a "house/home." What was wrong with Oklahoma where he grew up, or Maryland, where Leila lived with her mother, his ex-wife?
Shadid was not the first Arab-American to search for a place to call home. Before him, the late Edward Said, a Palestinian-American professor at the University of Columbia, published his memoirs in a book called "Out of Place."
And like Said, Sahdid mainly blamed the West for his lost home. Both men used their remarkably beautiful prose, ironically not in their native Arabic but in English, to describe the presumably harmonious Arab world that once existed before World War I, and before the colonials - first Britain and France and later the United States - wiped it out.
"Artificial and forced, instruments themselves of repression, the borders were their obstacle, having wiped away what was best about the Arab world," Shadid wrote. "They hewed to no certain logic; a glimpse at any map suggests as much. The lines are too straight, too precise to embrace the ambiguities of geography and history. They are frontiers without frontiers, ignorant of trajectories shaped by centuries, even millennia."
However, unlike Said who wrote about his displacement from the luxury of his Manhattan Apartment in New York, Shadid decided to do something about it. He immigrated back to Lebanon and was set to restore his ancestor's House of Stone to its past glory. "[I]magine I can bring back something that was lost," he argued.
That something was "Isber's world, which, while simpler, was no less tumultuous than my own." This begs the question: If Isber's world was disorderly, why blame the colonial borders for wiping "away what was best about the Arab world." And if Isber's world was already chaotic, why bring it back and insist on calling it home?
House of Stone is the story of Shadid's renovation project in southern Lebanon, interjected with his reconstruction of the history of his family in Marjayoun, and their emigration to the United States.
Along the way, Shadid narrated, mainly to a Western audience, the daily routine of his project, which included recruiting masons, haggling with suppliers and talking to friends. His narration, however, has a number of mistakes that gives away Shadid being a non-native. Despite his best effort to learn the Arabic language and culture during college days, Shadid still fell short of grasping all of the intricacies of Arab life.
For instance, when describing a fruit street vendor, Shadid wrote: "Bateekh, bateekh, bateekh, ala al sikeen ya bateekh," and translated it into: "Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon... a watermelon ready for the knife." While the translation might pass, Shadid missed the cultural nuance. When a Lebanese customer goes to buy a watermelon, he usually asks for assurances from the vendor about its "redness" and "sweetness." The vendor usually replies confidently that his watermelons are the best and takes out a knife offering to cut a small piece as a tasting sample to prove his claim. When vendors push their carts down the streets of Lebanon and shout "al sikeen ya batteekh," they don't mean "ready for the knife," like Shadid thought. Their "knife" call is an invitation to customers to challenge their claim.
In another paragraph, Shadid wrote: "In the Middle East, the tiles came to be known as sajjadeh, one of the Arabic words for carpet." In Arabic, at least in Lebanon, tiles mean blat. It is customary - especially in old houses - for tiles to be arranged in patterns to display nice geometric shapes, in which case they would be called "sajjadeh," or carpet.
Shadid died a few months ago because of his allergy to horses while being smuggled out of Syria where he had finished covering the ongoing revolution there. His book had not been published yet.
The book, his understanding of the heritage of his ancestors and their culture, summarizes his attempt to recreate what he thought was their better world, and live in it. That world, which perhaps never existed, he wanted to call home.
Shadid was cremated and his ashes thrown over the House of Stone and over the world that never existed, the world that he never barely got a chance to live in.
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HBitar
5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful story about heritage belonging immigration and familyReviewed in the United States on March 19, 2020
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A must read for every Lebanese longing for flashbacks from a beloved land and people who have withstood the ravages of many wars and then immigration. The writing is animated and humourous yet compelling warm humanistic and truthful. Simply a great legacy of a great author who has given his life to telling the stories of an embattled middle East.
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Niftyfriend
5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant, emotional and historicalReviewed in the United States on April 16, 2017
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A multi-generational story about Shadid's rebuilding his great-grandfather's house, he creates a mosaic of histories of his family, and the families of his friends and the builders.
He weaves the home's history and his families and friends histories with that of Lebanon and the nation's history before, during and after independence. His writing also an overview of Lebanon's civil war.
While a glossary with some of Arabic words might have been helpful, the book was obviously a passion for the writer and hopefully most of the readers will learn and understand those words through the context of the book.
I'm traveling to Lebanon in sixty days to stay with a Lebanese friend and her family. Thank you Mr. Shadid for sharing part of your country with me. Rest in peace.
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Jean Sue Libkind
5.0 out of 5 stars The Bookschlepper RecommendsReviewed in the United States on April 19, 2012
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To read this book is to grieve: for Tony, gone too soon; for Lebanon, lost among the politicians; for the idea of "place," where a family could belong. Shadid uses all of his Pulitzer-Prize winning reporting skills to interweave the story of his family (now in diaspora), the "Lebanon" created by others, an ancient way of life now shattered, and his own desire to rebuild his great-grandfather's home in Marjayoun. [Anyone who has done even limited restoration or remodeling of a house will identify with the quirks of the craftsmen, their "explanations," the inexplicable delays, the pleasant and not-so-pleasant surprises inside old walls. They will also recognize the satisfaction accomplishment. In his two-year narrative of tiles and tribulations, he reconstructs the lives of the people who built the house and whose descendants now thrive in other parts of the world. Shadid clarifies the murky chain of events that has been Lebanese history since the nation's inception. He forages and gathers antique elements and explains the significance and processes of long-lost artisans. May Allah protect what he has revived and may his daughter come to love it as he did. May Anthony Shadid rest in peace in its garden.
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teewers
5.0 out of 5 stars Getting to know a house, a village, and the family that lived thereReviewed in the United States on December 9, 2017
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Very well written. Through his interactions with his neighbors and workmen as well as his telling of his family's history, he provides insight into the cultural and political history of the village in Lebanon in which his parents and grandparents used to live. Clear-eyed and no sugar-coating, but no rants. Underlying all is his ongoing description of his efforts to restore his family's house and garden. Anyone who has attempted to restore an old house will appreciate the ups and downs of his experience. It becomes clear as the book progresses that the restoration of the house, although complicated, is possible. Sadly, though, the restoration of the previous culture and way of life in the village and the area around it is probably not, for a multitude of reasons.
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Betty D
4.0 out of 5 stars More than I expectedReviewed in the United States on January 2, 2015
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This is a well written book. I feel like I am right there with the author while he is restoring his grandfather's house. To be honest, I have not finished this book yet. I feel like I have been reading it for a very long time. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, but it does seem to be taking a very l-o-n-g time to finish. I am certainly learning a great deal about the history of Lebanon and Syria, certainly more than I expected to learn while reading a memoir of a house restoration. Again, not meant to sound like a bad thing. The author is very familiar with his family's history and conveys it in a very natural way. He portrays the lifestyle of a very different culture in a way that is informative and casual, and yet still feels quite cozy. I would recommend this book readily.
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