House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East

 While in Beirut, I read House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid. Shadid was a journalist for the Washington Post and the New York Times and I had the great honor of meeting him while I was a university student studying abroad in Beirut. I had read his articles and was in awe of the way he wrote, with humanity as the basis of his storytelling. He treated the characters in his news stories with empathy and dignity, recognizing and representing them as real people rather than economic statistics, results of poor foreign policy, or misguided fanatics as so much news coverage tends to do. Shadid was equally impressive in person, sharing stories and experiences from the field with humility and nuance. His untimely death was a real loss to the world of journalism. House of Stone is not journalism though, it is personal, it’s his memoir, the story of a Lebanese American searching for home, exploring his identity and reimagining his relationship with Lebanon. His journey is described through the process of going to his village Marjayoun and physically building a real house, stone by stone, tile by tile, with pieces of his family history woven into the story.