‘House of Stone’

Reviewed by STEVE COLL - New York Tim,es

Photo -Anthony Shadid, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, in the Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad in 2010.Peter Van Agtmael

HOUSE OF STONE - A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East 

By Anthony Shadid 

311 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

The pain and allure of departure, more than the satisfaction of arrival, run through the stories told in “House of Stone,” Anthony Shadid’s elegiac, heartbreaking memoir of the year he spent restoring a long-abandoned family home in southern Lebanon.

The book’s searching characters and mournful tone would be moving even if a reader had no knowledge that Mr. Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times and perhaps his generation’s finest chronicler of the Middle East, died on Feb. 16 at 43 while on assignment in Syria. As it is, 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 Mr. Shadid unobtrusively displays. 

Full review at The New York Times