Though we are enlightened by education and defined by careers, though our spirits are elevated by art and our minds refreshed by vacation, we are rooted to the world through family. From our parents to our most distant cousins, from the current generation back through antiquity, our lineages not only shape our destinies, they swell our chests with pride. They tie us to ethics and standards that must be generationally maintained. They ground us in a world that, absent these connections, would be a merciless hurricane, a maelstrom capable of leaving us shiftless and alone. Family is the tie that binds, the thread running through all we know. This is a truth quietly celebrated in Mr. Shadid's somber memoir.
Wearied by the cruelties of war and left isolated by the dissolution of his marriage, Anthony Shadid, an award-winning reporter for the Washington Post and the New York Times, relocated, in 2006, to Lebanon, the land of his ancestors. Aware that his great grandfather's house has been left to decay into disrepair, a dilapidation he equates with wider Lebanon, Shadid sets about on a months-long odyssey to restore the house to its former, Ottoman glory. Warned frequently by his pessimistic neighbors that the project is both pointless and foolhardy, Shadid ignores such wisdom, intent upon a mission of rediscovery. For as new concrete is poured and gardens cleared, as debris is removed and old fixtures buffed to new glory, Shadid ventures into his family's past to retrace their arrival in America where, beginning with his grandmother, they settled in Oklahoma, opening a local market whose financial nourishment would elevate their subsequent generations to university and then to professional careers, prospects unlikely to have been realized in the unsettled Middle East.
As the project to rebuild the old house hits snag after snag, as his dream of restoring some measure of the alluring past to the troubled present fades, Shadid appears on the brink of breaking, his soul too burdened by what his eyes have seen to press on in the face of endless obstacles. But then he comes to understand the house and its culture in a new light that burns away doubt and leaves behind the same, steely resolve that sustained his immigrant grandparents through the trials of journeying the new world. The project will be completed. The past will be restored. There will be a future for all that he holds dear.
Penned with a war correspondent's quiet, clenched grace, House of Stone is a memoir as beautiful as it is tragic. Mr. Shadid animates rural Lebanon with a painter's skill, breathing life into the attitudes that govern its people even while he does his best to understand and explain the enduring pessimism that hangs over this cursed country like a dark, forbidding cloud. But as much as he succeeds in coloring the landscapes and vivifying the people, aims which grant the reader a glimpse of Lebanon's tortured soul, it's the poignancy of his mission of reclamation that elevates the piece from the mundane to the exquisite.
Every page bleeds with Mr. Shadid's sincere attempt to restore something lost. Principally, this is in the service of his family, its name and its honor. However, he swiftly dives deeper than these important but superficial drives, reaching for something far more powerful. Hope, that he can find peace, that he can begin anew, that he can have a hand in leaving behind a legacy, that he can overcome the DNA of tormented Lebanon to create something beautiful, something new that honors the old while speaking to the continuum of human life and experience. This is as wonderfully conveyed via his attempt to build the house as it is through his artistic reconstructions of his ancestors immigrant journey to America, that distant and unfamiliar land.
This is as heartwarming as it is heartaching, not only for its content, but also for the fact that Mr. Shadid's dreams will necessarily remain half-formed. For not long after completing the restoration, he would die, in the spring of 2012, having been robbed, by death, of the full appreciation of his earnest endeavor. This is tender work worthy of a first-rate journalist. (4/5 Stars)
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