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

"Wonderful . . . One of the finest memoirs I've read." — Philip Caputo, Washington Post

In the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family's ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather's once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.

So begins the story of a battle-scarred...