House of Stone, by Anthony Shadid

Tragically, Shadid died this spring of an acute asthma attack, caused by a severe allergy to horses, which he was forced to use trying to reach safety in Turkey while covering the current crisis in Syria.  A well-known, Pulitzer-Prize-winning, Lebanese-American journalist, he was only 43 and this book was just about to be released.    As its subtitle says, it is “A memoir of home, family, and a lost Middle East.”  The book, covering the year between July 2006 and 2007, relates his rebuilding of the abandoned and war-scarred house that his great-grandfather had built in Marjayoun, in what is now Lebanon.  His first marriage has failed, and he has taken a year off from the Washington Post to reconstruct the house.  It is also the story of his family’s immigrant experience in the Oklahoma City area; of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and redrawing of national borders in the Middle East which has led to seemingly endless conflict in the area; and a meditation on what he calls “the lost Levant” when Christians, Jews, Muslims, and several other diverse peoples lived more successfully together.   He says “Gone was what had redeemed that long-ago Ottoman era, a Levant of many ethnicities and faiths that managed to intersect before the vagaries of nationalism.  Myths had to be imagined to join a certain people to a certain land that was so long shared.  Pasts were created and destinies claimed.  The borders reinforced the particulars of states with no ambition save the preservation of a petty despot’s power, or a people’s chauvinism, or a clan’s fear, and cosmopolitan cities gradually but irrevocably became national ones.  In the centuries that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire, all those states failed; none would quite capture the ambitions or demarcate the environments of the diverse peoples that had lived there so long.”  But parts of the book are very funny – putting the house back together with the help of the contractor and workers he found proved daunting.  To read it is also to understand the area a bit better.  And should you be as fascinated to see what the house became as I was, there are a series of videos that were made during its reconstruction on YouTube that are very interesting.  How sad that he and his second wife, who he married after the house was finished, and his two children, were only able to share this house briefly.  Inshallah, they will continue to preserve it and his memory. 311 pp.