Shadid, who died on Thursday at the age of forty-three, apparently of an asthma attack, while covering the conflict in Syria for the Times, was over the last decade or more the most intrepid, empathetic, fully engaged correspondent working in the Middle East for American audiences. The Arab world, like any other, was not best understood by focussing exclusively on its wars and conflicts (although he did not shy away from any of those, or whitewash their ugliness), but through its longer, subtler narratives of family, time, and transition. When he spoke about that project, and the life he had forged in Lebanon to carry it out, he mentioned a theme that was always present in his newspaper correspondence: that the “zone of crisis” frame that so often surrounded reporting from the Middle East was frustrating and inadequate. “House of Stone” tells the story of Shadid’s efforts to rebuild-and excavate the history of-a family property in Lebanon. Like many American writers whose families arrived here from somewhere else, he was drawn gradually to the landscape of his family’s origins. He attended the University of Wisconsin and went into newspaper work. Shadid grew up in Oklahoma, in a family of Lebanese origin. It is described by the publisher as a “a memoir of home, family and a lost Middle East.” The project, when Shadid talked about it occasionally, was more personal than that sort of subtitle can easily convey. Anthony Shadid’s third book, “House of Stone,” is due to be published in several weeks.
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