Library Journal
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Following the end of his marriage and an assignment covering the Iraq War, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Shadid (who died earlier this year at the age of 43) relocated to Lebanon to restore his great-grandfather's house. Shadid's blend of anecdote, family history, and regional politics creates a beautiful exploration of the meaning of home in an age of conflict. Narrator Neil Shah's strong pacing and precise pronunciation add to the journalistic tone. VERDICT Listeners with interests in the Middle East and Shadid's war reporting will appreciate this audiobook. [The Houghton Harcourt hc was a New York Times best seller.-Ed.]-Amy Koester, St. Charles City-Cty. Lib., Wentzville, MO (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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Shadid-a New York Times correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner, and grandson of immigrants- took a leave of absence to renovate his ancestral home in Lebanon. Shadid's "quixotic mission" was a search for identity. His great-grandfather left the house to his family to "join us with the past, to sustain us." Shadid went in search of that past, claiming, "I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one." He writes sentimentally of Lebanon, but his confession that the house was "memories of what I had imagined over many years" reveal a constructed emotion. The sentimentality sometimes borders on maudlin, and his identity quest is often lost among mundane construction details. Shadid claims to understand the "desire of those whose place had been taken away." He is presumably referring to his divorce, but his home renovation doesn't convince as healing process. History buffs, however, will appreciate the family and Middle Eastern historical asides. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Shadid is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the grandson of Lebanese immigrants. After reporting on various conflicts in the Middle East, he took an extended leave of absence to restore his family's ancestral home in Marjayoun, located in southern Lebanon. The effort was clearly an attempt to reconnect with or rediscover his family's past, and he uses the rebuilding of the home as a metaphor for that search. Shadid describes the town of Marjayoun in his great-grandfather's time in idyllic terms, where Christians and Muslims lived in relative harmony against a background of flourishing agriculture and physical beauty, dominated by the majestic peak of Mount Hermon. His memoir is well written and deeply felt, but his sentimentality sometimes seems over the top and his frequent jumps from past to present can be confusing. Still, this is an interesting and often emotionally stirring account of Shadid's search for a time and place that are irrevocably lost.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Washington Post covering the Israeli attack in Lebanon in 2006, Pulitzer winner Shadid (Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, 2005, etc.), the child of Lebanese Americans who grew up in America, painfully encountered the home of his Lebanese ancestors in the town of Marjayoun. It was a once-fine house that had been long abandoned and was hit by an Israeli rocket. The author then resolved to take a furlough from his newspaper and reconstruct the house, which had belonged to his great-grandfather and where his grandmother had spent her first 12 years before the family migrated to America. Shadid traces the two sides of his family that converged at the end of the 19th century in Marjayoun, the Samaras and the Shadids, whose subsequent migrations reflect the strife among the Syrian Lebanese Shiite community with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Suffering from his own divorce and separation from his small daughter, Shadid was often overcome by the "history of departures" witnessed by the house, the ruptures caused by loss and discord among the community of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and the tightly knit customs and rituals that kept things running. Shadid's year became occupied with finding permission to build, securing willing contractors and artisans and befriending sympathetic characters among the often hostile, suspicious townspeople. Much of the narrative is a gentle unfolding of observation and insight, as the author reacquaints himself with the Arabic rhythms, "absorbing beauties, and documenting what was no more." A complicated, elegiac, beautiful attempt to reconcile the physical bayt (home) and the spiritual.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.