Still Life with Bones Still Life with Bones

Still Life with Bones

Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

    • 5.0 • 2 Ratings
    • $9.99
    • $9.99

Publisher Description

New York Times Book Review Editors Choice • An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims’ families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice.

“Absorbing . . . multifaceted and elegiac . . . Still Life with Bones captures the ethos that drives the search—often tireless and against the odds—for truth.”—The New York Times

WINNER OF THE JUAN E. MÉNDEZ BOOK AWARD • A NEW YORKER AND BOOKPAGE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR


“Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration—of building something new with the ‘pile of broken mirrors’ that is memory, loss, and mourning.”

Throughout Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed more than two hundred thousand people. Argentina’s military dictatorship disappeared up to thirty thousand people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights. 

In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost. 

Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.

Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

GENRE
Nonfiction
RELEASED
2023
March 14
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
320
Pages
PUBLISHER
Crown
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
1.8
MB

More Books Like This

Making an Exit Making an Exit
2011
In the Wake In the Wake
2016
Life Beside Itself Life Beside Itself
2014
Paradise in Ashes Paradise in Ashes
2004
An Ethical Compass An Ethical Compass
2010
A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness
2011

More Books by Alexa Hagerty

Customers Also Bought

Blaze Me a Sun Blaze Me a Sun
2023
The Best Minds The Best Minds
2023
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
2021
The Body in Question The Body in Question
2019
The Escape Artist The Escape Artist
2022
Notes on an Execution Notes on an Execution
2022