House of Stone: a Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East is the story of a returning native son who has in mind what the locals see as an insane project of rebuilding his ancestors’ house in the war-stricken southern Lebanon. In this article I consider Shadid’s project of rebuilding a symbolic house on a land torn apart by political, ethnic, and religious divisions. It is a project that tvranslates a desire to transcend these divisions and unite the “heap of broken images” that the region has become.
