Postscript: Anthony Shadid, 1968-2012
Posted by Steve Coll
Anthony Shadid’s third book, “House of Stone,” is due to be published in several weeks. It is described by the publisher as a “a memoir of home, family and a lost Middle East.” The project, when Shadid talked about it occasionally, was more personal than that sort of subtitle can easily convey. Shadid grew up in Oklahoma, in a family of Lebanese origin. He attended the University of Wisconsin and went into newspaper work. Like many American writers whose families arrived here from somewhere else, he was drawn gradually to the landscape of his family’s origins. “House of Stone” tells the story of Shadid’s efforts to rebuild—and excavate the history of—a family property in Lebanon. When he spoke about that project, and the life he had forged in Lebanon to carry it out, he mentioned a theme that was always present in his newspaper correspondence: that the “zone of crisis” frame that so often surrounded reporting from the Middle East was frustrating and inadequate. The Arab world, like any other, was not best understood by focussing exclusively on its wars and conflicts (although he did not shy away from any of those, or whitewash their ugliness), but through its longer, subtler narratives of family, time, and transition. “House of Stone” is such a narrative.
Shadid, who died on Thursday at the age of forty-three, apparently of an asthma attack, while covering the conflict in Syria for the Times, was over the last decade or more the most intrepid, empathetic, fully engaged correspondent working in the Middle East for American audiences. He had many gifts and was an exceptionally graceful, easy, and generous man, but among the qualities that distinguished his work was the sheer commitment of it. When he came to the Washington Post about a decade ago to serve as a correspondent, I was working as an editor at the paper. I asked a standard job-interview question about his goals in the years ahead, and he provided one of the most striking, emphatic answers I can recall from countless discussions of that type: He intended to move to the Middle East, to chronicle in every dimension possible the upheavals in Arab societies that would inevitably follow the September 11th attacks, and to do nothing else, professionally. If we, the Post, would facilitate this ambition, he would be grateful, but that was the only job he was interested in or would be for years to come, he said. It is rare for anyone—never mind a writer—to possess such clarity. And Shadid carried out his plan exactly as he said he would, just not for the full measure of years that we would have wished.
There are other great Middle East correspondents working today—Robert F. Worth of the Times, for example—but none with Anthony’s personal story and outlook, which flowed into his story choices, sentences, and techniques. Journalists recognize each other’s signatures and tricks. One of Anthony’s was to frame a story around the proprietor of a single café, bookstore, or university department. It’s not easy to bring a passive character and setting of that sort to life, but Anthony did it again and again. Reading the whole body of his work was like reading a linked series of stories about a world of (usually) men bathed in cigarette smoke, hyped up on coffee, and ready to talk about why the world is the way it is. Like a great short-story writer, Shadid’s use of these characters was neither too heavy nor too light; he let them breathe and speak, and they allowed the reader to join in, to slip inside worlds and ways of thinking normally closed off.
In 2003, the Iraq war was brewing and Shadid wanted to be in Baghdad, working independently, when it began. Shadid was married at the time, with a small daughter at home. (Later, that marriage would end; he was married a second time, to Nada Bakri, with whom he had a son.) As the “shock and awe” bombing began and the future of Saddam Hussein’s regime fell into doubt, he arranged a conference call to explain, as a low-key country lawyer might, why he should be allowed to remain on the ground and assume the risks ahead. He persuaded; his work from Iraq was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the first of two he won during his career, and became the basis for his first, excellent book, “Night Draws Near.” The foreboding and ambivalence that the characters he wrote about expressed was striking at the time, but as the years have passed and Iraq’s initial crisis has yielded to the ambiguous mess we know today, it is evident that the middle-class, unofficial, urban Iraqis he chronicled had envisioned their own future very accurately. As in so many other cases, Shadid was willing to sit still, away from the main story, and listen. He will be missed; his work is irreplaceable.
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Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.
Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the Free Syrian Army and other armed elements of the resistance to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose military forces have been engaged in a harsh repression of the political opposition in a conflict that is now nearly a year old.
The Syrian government, which tightly controls foreign journalists’ activities in the country, had not been informed of his assignment by The Times.
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But Mr. Hicks said that Mr. Shadid, who had asthma and had carried medication with him, began to show symptoms as both of them were preparing to leave Syria on Thursday, and the symptoms escalated into what became a fatal attack. Mr. Hicks telephoned his editors at The Times, and a few hours later he was able to take Mr. Shadid’s body into Turkey.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-a-new-york-times-reporter-dies-in-syria.html?_r=2&src=tp
Posted by Greg Mitchell
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Anthony Shadid, 43, perhaps the most respected US reporter covering numerous wars and battles zones throughout the Middle East and North Afrida in the past dozen years, died today in Syria. He reportedly suffered an asthma attack. His body was then carried across the border to Turkey by his New York Times colleague, photographer Tyler Hicks.
Shadid won two Pulitizers for his coverage while with the Washington Post and had just been nominated for this year’s prize by the Times. HIs last article for the paper was on turmoil in Libya. It ran on February 9 and, typically, drew wide attention and praise.
This is certain to be one of the biggest losses to journalism in years. Shadid, who spoke fluent Arabic, had long provided perhaps the most valuable coverage of the so-called “Arab street.” He once said no story was worth dying for, but some were worth taking big risks for, and recently indicated that Syria was one such story.
In a statement, Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the Times, said, “Anthony died as he lived—determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/166327/anthony-shadid-top-new-york-times-reporter-dies-syria
Journalists and senior politicians have been reacting to the death of 'one of the world's bravest and best journalists
Ben Dowell
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17
Snip
Susan E Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, wrote on Twitter that she was "heartbroken" by the loss of Shadid, who had been reporting inside Syria for a week. She called him "one of the world's bravest and best journalists".
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper also took to Twitter to mourn the "terrible loss" and pay tribute to the "brave and smart reporter".
Martin Baron, the editor of Shadid's old paper the Boston Globe told the New York Times that the he "had such a profound and sophisticated understanding of the region". Baron added: "More than anything, his effort to connect foreign coverage with real people on the ground, and to understand their lives, is what made his work so special."
"He changed the way we saw Iraq, Egypt, Syria over the last, crucial decade," said Phil Bennett, a former managing editor of The Washington Post who worked closely with Shadid, told the paper. "There is no one to replace him."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/17/anthony-shadid-new-york-times-tributes?CMP=twt_fd
