Award-winning New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid died tragically last week while reporting on the civil strife unfolding in Syria.  He collapsed from a severe asthma attack shortly after slipping into Syria across its border with Turkey, and the Times photographer traveling with him was unable to revive him or get him back to medical aid in time to save him.

Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who was fluent in Arabic, began his career in the early 1990s reporting for AP from Cairo, then The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer in 2004 and 2010.  He had faced peril earlier in his career, having been shot in 2002 in the West Bank and kidnapped with other journalists by Qaddafi's forces in Libya last year.

Shadid's book publications include Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (2005), a harrowing look at the experiences of ordinary Iraqis in the midst of the war.  His posthumously published memoir House of Stone: A Saga of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East recounts his return after his Libyan ordeal to his great-grandfather's home in Lebanon, which he had begun restoring a few years earlier.

Anthony Shadid's death reminds us of the risks involved in real, boots-on-the-ground journalism.  His articulate reporting and masterful writing painted a vivid picture of the tumultuous Middle East.