Salon.com > Anthony Shadid

Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers among National Book Award finalists

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:20:00 +0000

It's been a great year for Junot Díaz: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author recently won a coveted MacArthur genius grant, and his latest book, "This Is How You Lose Her," is a bestseller. Now "Lose Her" has landed him on the finalist list for the National Book Award. Díaz is joined by veteran writer and McSweeney's founder Dave Eggers ("A Hologram for the King"), Pulitzer Prize finalist Louise Erdrich ("The Round House"), Ben Fountain ("Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk") and newcomer Kevin Powers ("The Yellow Birds").

Nonfiction finalists include New Yorker staff writer Katherine Boo's journey in an Indian slum (“Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity"), tireless biographer and journalist Robert A. Caro, for his fourth book on Lyndon B. Johnson (“The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson") and a posthumous nomination for New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid (“House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East"), who died earlier this year while on assignment in Syria.

He was our eyes

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:29:00 +0000

I was stunned and saddened to learn of the death of Anthony Shadid, the great New York Times reporter who covered the Middle East. Shadid was quite simply the best mainstream reporter working the most important foreign beat in the world. From his superb coverage of Iraq to his groundbreaking reporting on the Arab Spring, he set the journalistic standard. Shadid’s profound knowledge of the Arab world, his even-handedness, his historical sophistication, and above all his empathy for the ordinary people he wrote about, made him indispensable.

His death is not just a terrible loss to journalism: it is a loss to America. Even though the United States is at war with two Middle Eastern countries, and stands on the brink of war with a third, most Americans, including our politicians and many so-called “experts,” know almost nothing about it – which is one of the reasons we embarked upon the disastrous Iraq war. Like all great reporters, Shadid penetrated the darkness. He took us not just into streets and cafes, but into hearts and minds. He showed the impact of decisions made by politicians and generals in far-away lands on housewives and young girls and street vendors, on small human beings just trying to live decent lives. He was our eyes.

Anthony Shadid yearned for home

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:42:00 +0000

Anthony's Shadid's now unbearably poignant book, "House of Stone," opens with a scene of carnage that will be familiar to anyone who read his coverage of the wars of the Middle East. As a reporter for the Washington Post in the summer of 2006, he arrived in the devastated Lebanese town of Qana to find that "Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning's work … the dead standing, sitting looking around, the village, its voices and stories, plate and bowls, letters and words, its history, obliterated in a few extended moments" of indiscriminate violence perpetrated by America's favorite ally. As he wandered amid the devastation, he found a man mourning the death of his wife and five children. "'I wish God would have left me with just one child,' said the bereft former father."

In its sympathetic detail, rhythmic language and political realism, the passage is pure Shadid. But the book quickly pivots from war into a ruminative "memoir of home, family and a lost Middle East." From Qana, Shadid went on to visit Marjayoun, a village in southern Lebanon where his grandmother had lived as a girl before emigrating to the United States. When he saw that a half-exploded Israeli rocket had wrecked the abandoned house where she grew up, he promised to himself that he would rebuild it, to create what Arabic speakers call a bayt, not just a house, not just a home, but the enduring edifice of a family.