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

In spring 2011, Anthony Shadid was one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya, cuffed and beaten, as that country was seized by revolution. When he was freed, he went home. Not to Boston or Beirut where he lives or to Oklahoma City, where his Lebanese-American family had settled. Instead, he returned to his great-grandfather's estate in Lebanon, a house that, over three years earlier, Shadid had begun to rebuild. House of Stone is the story of a battle-scarred home and a war correspondent's jostled spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house's renewal alongside his family's flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. He memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into this volatile landscape. House of Stone is an unforgettable meditation on war, exile, rebirth and the universal yearning for home.