By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
A family memoir by Anthony Shadid, who died Thursday at 43, while reporting on the civil war in Syria, will be published Feb. 28, instead of March 27, as originally scheduled.
Shadid's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, also says it will recruit the author's friends and colleagues to take his place speaking on behalf of his book, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East, which was inspired by a 2006 visit to his grandmother's former home in Lebanon.
Shadid, an native of Oklahoma City who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting in Iraq for The Washington Post, died of an apparent asthma attack while on assignment in Syria for The New York Times.
He had been scheduled to return to the USA next month for a 20-city book tour for House of Stone, which has received advance praise.
Author Dave Eggers (What Is the What) called the book an "undeniable and instant classic," and wrote, "I have no idea how Shadid pulled all this off while talking about the history of modern Lebanon, how he balanced ribald humor and great warmth with the sorrow woven into a story like this, but anyway, we should all be grateful that he did."
In an e-mail to the staff of The Times, executive editor Jill Abramson wrote that "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."
Read the New York Times full obituary.
