Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

 Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

Reviewed By  Nan van Dissel       March 18, 2023

 

Author  Dr Alexa Hagerty

Distributor:      Hachette Australia
ISBN:                 9781472295774
Publisher:         Wildfire
Release Date:   March 2023  

Website:    https://exislepublishing.com 

FaceBook:   

YouTube:   

Instagram:   

X formally Twitter:   

In their bloody wake, the dictatorships of Argentina and Guatemala left a task, which was seemingly impossible, but definitely urgent; finding the disappeared. Alexa Hagerty, medical anthropologist, researcher and scholar of science, technology, and society, in this powerful memoir sensitively explores the work of Anthropologist in documenting these genocides in South America and the world of forensic exhumation of mass graves.

The author blends the dark history of Guatemala’s almost forty years of state sponsored terrorism and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (a targeted campaign by the Argentine government to wipe out suspected dissidents and subversives), with a compassionate personal account of her life as part of a forensic team, which is committed to reclaiming the dead and returning them to their grieving families; often at great personal risk and cost. She perceptively recounts her meetings with the families of the deceased and their desire for their dead to have a proper burial.

Readers experience archeological digs for human bones, which are both physically and emotionally draining, through the eyes of a social Anthropologist; one who is gaining extraordinary expertise in identifying the dead and how they died.

In a world littered with killing fields, this well written, incredibly powerful book, with its comprehensive detailed notes, is a practical handbook for Anthropologist’s involved in returning the many bodies waiting to be found and brought back to the people who love them.

History, Non Fiction