02 Sep / House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
When Anthony Shadid’s own nuclear family falls apart – his marriage ends, he’s separated from his only child – he returns to Marjayoun, Lebanon in August, 2007 with “foolish and rash … not to mention reckless, dangerous, and altogether ‘American’” intentions: to rebuild his great-grandfather’s house. Intertwined with the nine-month restoration experience, the double-Pulitzer winner Shahid dovetails his extended-family’s journey from a troubled ancestral country to a reinvented life based in Oklahoma, U.S.A.
Just before publication, Shadid died suddenly on February 16, 2012, of an asthma attack while he was on assignment in Syria; his looming, tragic death becomes a haunting presence throughout. Shadid populates his odyssey with a cast of encouraging, truculent, self-important, even comical characters (many distantly related, of course!), all of whom veteran narrator Shah chimerically embodies, reading with empathy and grace, ensuring Shadid’s affecting memoir gets just the right send-off. Shah reverently conveys Shadid’s superb journalistic acuity in creating a gorgeous patchwork of family and country, of leaving and return, and most of all, of stories worth preserving.
Review: “Media,” Booklist Online, August 9, 2019
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012