House of Stone by Anthony Shadid

Abstract

Vyacheslav Pyetsukh The New Moscow Philosophy Twisted Spoon Press Residents of a crowded Moscow apartment are shaken by a mysterious disappearance. Translator Krystyna Anna Steiger describes Pyetusukh’s novel as “a late-Soviet variant, a meta-literary, nostalgic homage to Dostoevsky’s classic [Crime and Punishment] and the classical Russian literary tradition as a symbiosis of literature and life.” Timothy Murphy Hunter’s Log Dakota Institute Press There is nothing quite like hunting with a good dog—teamwork beyond the spoken word, the beauty of a completed retrieve, fatigue at the end of a long day in the field. The rural North Dakota landscape comes alive in these poems, accompanied by Eldridge Hardie’s finely crafted illustrations. march–april 2012 | 77 Nota Bene ing as Stanley Booth’s narcotized The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. The selections skew in favor of New Journalism practitioners; the names Wolfe, Mailer, Didion, and Thompson (whose participatory journalism opus “Hell’s Angels” is curiously absent) are the common refrain by book’s end. However, CJR does well to include evaluations of war-zone reportage, cultural phenomena , business coverage, and general features, tracing and snipping common threads of influence throughout. The aspiring journalist would do well to navigate the enormous gap that develops between Indian social classes in Naresh Fernandes’s essay on Palagummi Sainath’s Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Regions. Likewise, Gal Beckerman finds South African Rian Malan’s harrowing apartheid memoir , My Traitor’s Heart, “instructive for any writer trying to find a way to capture the truth of a conflict without simply pitting one side’s narrative against the other’s.” The morning-breakfast-andnewspaper reader (a dying breed) must take note as well: newsprint never proves as simple as black and white, and as much as we’d like it to, Second Read reminds us that a good story often begs more questions than objective answers. Matt Carney Norman, Oklahoma Anthony Shadid. House of Stone. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt . 2012. isbn 9780547134666 Some might consider building a home in a country as politically volatile and prone to violence as Lebanon an exercise in futility, especially somebody who’s witnessed as much destruction, conflict, and carnage as Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign affairs reporter Anthony Shadid. But despite all the violence he’s observed and even fallen prey to in the Middle East (Shadid was shot in the shoulder by a sniper while covering the West Bank in 2002 and kidnapped, beaten , and held hostage for four days in Libya last spring), the New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief shares an enlightening and occasionally poignant memoir of loss, redemption, and hope in House of Stone, his own tale of creation and genealogical reconciliation . Two long stories, made short: First, Shadid took a year of absence from his position reporting in the Middle East to rebuild his family’s ancestral home in Marjayoun, Lebanon . Second, after amassing hours of interviews with family members, old diaries, and other firsthand documents , he tells the story of his greatgrandfather Isber Samara, who sent his children off to America to avoid the violence that marked the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The two alternate as separate narratives, combining to tell reviews a longer, more comprehensive story than the thousand-word dispatches to which Shadid is accustomed. Sympathetic Lebanese and American characters emerge, their hope or lack of hope for a peaceful existence spelled out across a setting evoked in the small details noticeable only to a world-class reporter’s eye. While similar-sounding to a Tom Wolfe–style sample of immersion journalism, House of Stone falls squarely in the realm of the memoir, with its author obsessing over details from the past that ultimately spin full-circle: “I often wondered whether Isber, whose life was altered so unexpectedly by the events of his era, felt as dispirited as I did about the fate of his homeland,” Shadid writes. “How deeply had he felt the loss that led me to his house?” That question of loss ultimately proves the source of Shadid’s fear— and his motivation to prevent it by rebuilding the home. In a...