Knowing that "House of Stone" was a National Book Award Non-Fiction Nominee for 2012, and that Anthony Shadid was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, I was eager to pick up this book. But only very few books prove to have universal appeal, and this book proved that point to me.

I wanted to enjoy it, and tried to like it, but it just wasn't a book for me. It's really something of a memoir of the author, and the book focused on the rebuilding of a long-held family home in Lebanon, built by the author's great-grandfather and having fallen into disrepair over the years. But home improvement projects are fraught with mishaps under the best of circumstances even in the most modern Countries, and reading about his Lebanese construction and contractor problems wasn't surprising nor of much interest to me. The acceptance of a work culture as Shadid described, where a promise of "tomorrow" simply means "sometime in the future", failed to make me sympathetic to his project. (Personal disclaimer: To be perfectly honest, the fact that as a young man, I found myself on the wrong side of a knife-wielding street thug on the streets of Beirut many years ago may still be dimming my enthusiasm for Shadid's description of the people, the culture, and the land). However, if you can lose yourself in Shadid's descriptions of a new and novel place, you may well find the narrative somewhat more compelling, but I found no purpose in his writing. Had Shadid been able to add a little more detail about the specific historical turmoil in the region, and personalized that a little more, I might have found the book a little more interesting. ( )

I registered this book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14429514

Journalist Anthony Shadid grew up in the U.S. but wanted to forge more of a connection to his past family. He retreated to the home originally built by Isber Samara, Anthony's great-grandfather, in Marjayoun, Lebanon. Built to last for generations, the house was vacant and had suffered not only the ravages of time but also unfortunate remodels for those who lived there over the years. It was hard to see what a magnificent structure it once was.

Isber built it for his family. To be a home and a place to visit for his descendants. Yet he himself was forced to send his children off to a distant land - the United States - when their existence was threatened by continuous war. Anthony, growing up in Oklahoma among many Lebanese immigrants, had a sense of what it could be like to be among family, among generous family, for eternity. He wanted to restore that house and all it meant.

The house belonged to the family, which was spread all over the world. Nobody was taking care of it, however. Because Anthony's ownership was actually a very small part of the total, many people in Marjayoun advised against doing anything to it. They told him stories of others who had such ambitious dreams and who spent much on homes, only to have others in the family challenge them later. But Anthony's mind was made up.



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Very interesting personal view into a topic I don't know much about. I appreciated Shadid's candor ( )

A bit lengthy, sometimes delve too deep in situations without apparent cause. Nonetheless, it draws a wonderful sketch of Marjayoun within a wider context and across time. ( )

There are a lots of books out there that tell you about how difficult home construction projects can be, and lots of books about the Middle East, but I'd wager that few are as thoughtful and affecting as "House of Stone." In it, the author, a successful correspondent for the Washington Post and the New York Times describes his attempts to rebuild the elegant house in southern Lebanon that his great-gradfather built around the time that the Ottoman Empire finally fell apart. It contains a lot of information about building materials, the architectural traditions of the Middle East, and all of this may be of more or less interest to the average reader, but there's a whole more to "House of Stone" than that.

"House of Stone" is, in many ways, about small-town Middle Eastern life, and maybe about small-town life in general. Marjayoun -- the town that Shadid's extended family calls home -- is a quiet, sleepy place that has been on the wrong side of most of the geopolitical shifts that the region has undergone over the past hundred or so years. It seems to have been in elegant decay for generations. Shadid does a lovely job of describing the town's rhythms -- its linguistic formalities, never-ending schedule of visits and greetings, and complex clan politics. He speaks Arabic and is recognized as more-or-less a citizen of the place, but "House of Stone" is, in a sense, a story of the author discovering what he didn't know about his own culture. He slowly learns when to hurry the laborers he's hired and when to let them to work at his own pace, when to bargain, how much to tell his neighbors, and how to joke with and show respect to the people around him. This is a book that's as much about rediscovery as it is about rebuilding.

The author is clearly fond of his ancestral home, and his descriptions of it and its lush landscape are beautiful and moving. At the same time, he laments that the fact that it seems to be a beautiful, verdant place without much of a future. Things move slowly there: it's almost a miracle when a tradesman shows up on the day that he says that he will. But the town also seems to be full of disappointed people, the descendants of noble families that have been left without much to do. He spends a lot of time smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey, and eating Middle Eastern finger food with people who've made it their principal occupation. The other side of this coin is the few truly excellent people he finds or hears about in his family's old town: a local doctor, now reduced by cancer, who spent his life caring for his patients before dedicating himself to gardening and building musical instruments. He meets tradesmen who faithfully practice arts that are falling into disuse with the eye and patience of real artists. He tells the readers about a few of the town's extremely distinguished, highly educated older residents while also describing the struggles of his immigrant family in frontier Oklahoma and how it made them tough and unsentimental. "House of Stone" is, in some ways, a book about what it means to be a good man. Shadid won a couple of Pulitzers before his too-early death, but he's still not too proud to admit that he sometimes wonders how well he measures up to earlier generations and to some of Marjayoun's current residents. Funnily enough, "House of Stone" also seems to demonstrate that even some of the town's most dissipated, least impressive residents make, in their own way, some small contributions to either the rebuilding of the Shadeed family house or Antony's stay in Marjayoun. The author is, in other words, compassionate toward most everyone he meets.

Lastly, while it'd probably be going a bit too far to call Shadeed a nostalgic, he seems to yearn for a Middle East that existed previous to the First World War in which the inefficient, ecumenical Ottoman Empire enabled the region's various religious and political factions to live together in relative peace. Since he's a returning emigrant himself, the fact that he's a bit of a cosmopolitan isn't particularly surprising, but his analysis effectively shows the ways that the Middle East's current organizing principles -- sectarian politics and post-Sykes-Picot nationalism -- simply aren't working. As a member of an Orthodox Christian minority, he worries that his community lacks what he terms guarantee of survival in the current political environment, and while his criticisms of Israel are muted, as befits a journalist, he also talks to a few people who tell him that the Israeli occupation, unjust as it was, at least managed to bring a measure of stability to the region. As the epilogue written by his widow spells out, he'd witnessed unimaginably awful acts of violence as a journalist and seen the damage that war could do. He'd faced death numerous times himself. One gets the feeling that both his efforts to restore his family's house and to write this book were efforts to impose some order and encourage some healing in a world that had far too little of each. All in all, this book is a lovely, important, and, in many ways, deeply melancholy read. ( )