In the Middle East, a bayt, literally meaning “home,” is sacred. It is, as Anthony Shadid says, “the identity that does not fade.” With these words, a journey is born.

Pulitzer-prize winner Anthony Shadid was released from captivity in Libya and decided to return to his ancestral home in Lebanon. House of Stone, his last work before his untimely death earlier this year, chronicles his journey as he rebuilt the house and paints a vivid picture of his family’s flight to America.

The memoir is filled with descriptive passages that make the readers feel like they too are part of the struggle to restore Shadid’s bayt. He introduces his family, both still living and long gone, and he introduces his town, Marjayoun, located near the Lebanon-Israel border.

As Shadid works to return his house on the hill to its former grandeur, members of his family become a part of the story, as they work and live, play and escape.

These sections about his family are the true gems of the book. They show a journey of hardship that many of our ancestors -– or maybe we ourselves –- faced, fleeing to America. These scenes bring more meaning to the house than Shadid can explain just through his experiences restoring it.

Shadid spent years in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. His work covering the Iraq War earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, and he died of an asthma attack while covering the uprisings in Syria in February.

As House of Stone is Shadid’s final work, reading this very personal tale is all the more special. I highly recommend it for people who have ever tried to discover their family roots.

House of Stone is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing at a list price of $26.

Book Review: House of Stone The Saturday Evening Post

Deborah grew up in Oxfordshire, England, the youngest of seven siblings. Her father loved agriculture and animals, and Debo, as she is known to her friends, inherited that love and spent her childhood roaming her family’s lands with him. When she was older, the family moved to London, where she met Andrew Cavendish, the second son of the Duke of Devonshire.

Andrew’s brother’s untimely death during World War II made him his father’s heir, and when the Duke died, Andrew and Debo gained vast tracts of land in England and Ireland, including the magnificent family seat, Chatsworth.

But it is not Debo’s wealth and position that brings her story to life. Instead, it is the friends and family whose stories she shares. From the antics of her five older sisters—including an elopement to Spain and a prison sentence—to tales of funny friends, like the writer Evelyn Waugh, Debo brings people to life and invites readers to become a part of her captivating world.

My personal favorite recollections are of her times with the Kennedys. Andrew’s brother was married to Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy before his death, and the Devonshires remained close to the family, even being personally invited to sit with the family during Jack Kennedy’s inauguration. Debo also had connections to the greats (and terrible) of Europe: She played host to Prince Philip at her family estate and called Prime Minister Macmillan “Uncle Harold” – and she even had tea with Hitler before the outbreak of World War II!

Duchess Deborah led an amazing life, traveling the world and meeting incredible people. She also inherited the writing bug that bit two of her sisters, Jessica and Nancy, and her witty and insightful comments bring her characters alive and draw people into her world.

This book is for Anglophiles, but it’s also for anyone who loves a well-told story or longs to spice up their usual fiction with a terrific memoir.

Wait for Me! is available now from Picador at a list price of $18.

Book Review: Wait for Me! The Saturday Evening Post

“I’ve been going to the same barber shop for fourteen years,” he said harshly, as I sat down. “I went to it for the last time today. I took off my coat and necktie the way I always do, and then I noticed there were three women sitting there in the waiting chairs and looking at me as if I’d committed a crime. Mad at me for taking off my coat and collar in a place where they had no right to be themselves! I thought probably they were them to solicit for a charity or something; but just then old George called ‘Next!’ And my soul, if one of those women didn’t get right up and march to the chair and sit down in it !

“That wasn’t the worst of it. The person that had just got out of the chair was wearing boots and breeches, but it wasn’t a man. It was a girl—one that had been a nice-looking girl, too, until she sat down in that chair and had three feet of beautiful thick brown hair out off. She was my own daughter, Julie, nineteen years old. I didn’t my a word to her—not then; I just looked at her. Then I told old George I guessed his shop was getting to be too co-educational for me and I put on my things and went out. I’ll never set foot in the place again!”

“Where will you get your hair cut, judge?”

“I guess we’d better learn to cut our own hair, we men,” he mid bitterly. “There really isn’t any place left nowadays where we can go to get by ourselves. Coming home from Washington the other day, I was in the Pullman smoker—what they call the club car — and I’ll eat my shirt if four women didn’t come in there and light cigarettes and sit down to play bridge!

Never turned a hair—didn’t have any hair long enough to turn, for that matter. They won’t let us keep a club car, or any kind of club, to ourselves nowadays;

they got to have anyway half of it.

“I said when we let ‘em into the polling booth they’d never be contented with that, and I was right. Remember all the fuss they made about their right to vote? Well, they’ve proved they didn’t care about that at all, because more than half the very women that made the fuss don’t bother to vote, now they know they can. They just wanted to show as we couldn’t have anything On earth to ourselves. They haven’t left as one single refuge.

“It used to be a man could at least go hang around a livery stable when he felt lonesome for his kind; but now there aren’t any more livery stable. He can’t go to a saloon; there aren’t any more saloons. [Written in 1929, nearly a decade into Prohibition] Once he could go sit in a hotel lobby, because that was a he place; nowadays hotel lobbies are full of women sitting there all day. When I studied law there weren’t three women in all the offices downtown; now you can’t find an office without a bob-haired stenographer in it, and there are dozens of women got their own offices—every kind of offices.

“That’s another thing I’ve been having it out with Julie about. She’s not only cut off her hair; she wants to go into business as soon as she finds out what kind she’d enjoy most. She’s like the rest—the one thing that gives her the horrors is the idea of staying home.

“What’s become of the old home life in this country anyhow? Everybody seems to have to be going somewhere every minute. There’s the car in the garage: it’ll take us anywhere—let’s go! ‘Let’s go’ is the unceasing national cry.

“I understand there’s a great deal of what they’ve now invented a horrible new word for—’necking’ — while they’re on the road between parties and movies and end-of-the-night breakfasts. But it’s always, ‘Let’s go—let’s go anywhere except home!”

He paused for a moment, while his bushy gray eyebrows were contorted in a frown of distressed perplexity: then he looked at me almost with pathos and speaking slowly, asked a question evidently sincere: “Does it ever seem to you, nowadays, that maybe we’re all—all of us, young people and old people both—that maybe we’re all crazy?”

Read the full story, “The World Does Move,” from July 7, 1928 [PDF].

How America Is Falling To Pieces Around Us: 1928 Version The Saturday Evening Post