Shadid locates the impressive stone house built by his wealthy great-grandfather, Isber Samara.Ī few months later, Shadid visits Marjayoun again, to find that the upper story of Isber Samara’s house has been half-destroyed by an Israeli rocket. Now perched on the Israeli border, the formerly prosperous Ottoman town has endured a century of warfare and appears to be in terminal decline. From Beirut, he travels to Marjayoun, the largely Christian Lebanese town from which both sides of his family, the Shadids and the Samaras, had emigrated to Oklahoma early in the twentieth century. His marriage is falling apart, in part, due to the pressures of his dangerous career. It is his fifteenth year as a war correspondent, and five years earlier, he was shot by an Israeli sniper. Shadid begins his story in 2006: he is in Lebanon, covering the eighteen-day war for The Washington Post. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. House of Stone was published posthumously after Shadid was killed while reporting on the conflict in Syria for The New York Times. Alongside this personal story, Shadid relates his family’s history in Ottoman-era Lebanon and in America, as well as portraying the contemporary decline of his family’s hometown, Marjayoun. It narrates Shadid’s “quixotic project” to rebuild the family home his Lebanese family abandoned when they emigrated to the United States. House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East is a 2012 book by American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid.
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