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

by Alexa Hagerty

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.

"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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Science, True Crime, Anthropology, Memoir, Audiobook

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 14, 2023

About the author

Alexa Hagerty is an anthropologist researching science, technology, and human rights. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is an associate fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research has received honors and funding from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Ethnological Society, among others. She has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Social Anthropology, and Palais de Tokyo.

Author photo: Hélène Ressayres

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly one of the best books I have ever read

[claud · Rating 1 out of 5]

i actually found the book itself to be relatively okay and enjoyed her anthropologist perspective. unfortunately, though, i think hagerty is full of shit. towards the end of the book she discusses how she’s stepping away from analyzing the bones of victims and instead focusing her time to help prevent future genocides from happening. sounds great! however i decided to look at her social media and she’s been silent on the genocide currently happening in palestine. but don’t fret! she’s is promoting her book about genocide!

i already take issue with people who have stayed silent these past few months, but when you write a book about how genocide is bad, you should probably condemn a genocide when it’s happening. especially when you consider it your line of work. all of the book was left invalid for me after discovering her silence on the matter. the experiences and heartache that felt real in the memoir suddenly clouded for me and felt ingenuine after the fact.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexa Hegarty’s Still Life with Bones is very well described by its subtitle: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Her book, while at times difficult to read, as anything on this topic should be, seems incredibly well done to this reader. Hegarty, an anthropologist pursuing an advanced degree, takes time away from studying to explore her field of interest and travel to South America which has seen multiple examples of state sponsored terrorism since approximately the 1960s. Out of this has grown an increasing volume of missing people, often called the “the disappeared.”

Hegarty’s purpose: to work with the forensic scientists, the archaeologists, the local historians, families, to learn more about the actual terror campaigns and perpetrators, their victims, and learn more about and from those left behind, while joining the search for the missing…hundreds of thousands in multiple countries, and return as many as possible to their families.

I very highly recommend this book to anyone interested in history. While it deals with events primarily in Guatemala and Argentina, the situations, issues, and tactics used are being applied now around the world, wherever similar terror tactics and massacres have taken people away from their lives and families. While it is difficult reading at times, I believe it is also important.

A copy of this book was provided by Crown books/Random House through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

[Bon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was extremely informative and a very somber, sad read. Can't say much more than that; no gallows humor here, just a lot of grim history with a few gleams of hope for future justice for remains across South America.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've done a fair bit of reading general-audience forensic anthropology both in criminal and in human rights contexts. I respect those who have trained themselves to "listen" to bones, flesh, soil, and insect activity in order to "set things right"—to tell the tale of what happened and to seek justice. The titles by forensic anthropologists working in the criminal field are generally presented as series of puzzles. Who was this person? What happened? These titles are often reflective in interesting ways, but each case is separated from others, so one gets a string of short narratives, rather than a longer, single narrative.

The books with a broader, human rights focus elicit an ongoing sort of reflection—cumulative, if you will. That's very much the case for Alexa Hagerty's Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Hagerty's book focus on two genocides, in Guatemala and in Argentina. She was still a graduate student when she did this work, though the book reflects her broader, current professional knowledge. She worked on other genocides, but now works in human rights research outside of the forensic realm.

The focus on two regions allows Hagerty time to give us a history of the relatively recent field of human rights forensic anthropology and its application to crimes against humanity. She lets us get to know people working in this field over time, who had the audacity to try to document systems of violence. In the two regions she explores, those who began this work had some guidance from professional forensic anthropologists, but were generally young, college-age individuals who had the courage to challenge regimes still very much in place, even if they'd ostensibly been ended.

Hagerty also provides historical information that contextualizes these atrocities so that they become reflections on the ways we can convince ourselves that a genocide is working toward a "good" of some sort. (I'm using "we" here because many of us might embrace, or at least tolerate, genocide if we were raised within a value system that saw it as achieving a public good. I hope that wouldn't be true for me, but I don't think I can be sanguine and assume my hands would remain clean in other circumstances.)

Hagerty reflects on what it means to disinter and reinter those killed by genocide. The work can provide information, but she's less certain that it provides closure in the sense that many claim it does. Families "lucky" enough to have a disappeared loved one identified have an opportunity to enact funerary rituals, but there is no bringing the dead back. In some cases, relatives embrace forensic investigation. In Guatemala in particular families or communities can be present during disinterments, allowing a kind of kind of witnessing that can include testimony as the violent past is being uncovered. This is a rarity in a field where the demands of science have tended to put barriers between anthropologists and affected individuals.

I could go on here, but Hagerty says all of this better, more powerfully, and with more carefully selected detail than I possibly can. If you are the sort who asks questions about what it means to be human, what we are capable of—both good and bad—and the way systems make violence possible, you will want to read Still Life with Bones. Hagerty is an effective, thoughtful companion through this journey.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heavy read on the genocides of Guatemala and Argentina, and one anthropologist's navigation of the intersections of present and past, family and body, forensics and humanity.

[Eliza Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hagerty writes such a powerful meditation on death, genocide and political murder, it reads like prose. She combines personal interviews, history lessons, and physical experiences on anthropologically reading bones, and I walked away with such a confusing juxtaposition of horror and serenity. This is Hagerty’s power, to show us the atrocities of these massacres up close paired with the closure and spiritual dealings of death. I feel blessed to have gotten time with her thoughts.

s/o to my friend Aubrey who edited this book!!!!

[Bookish_Spren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you @Crown Publishing and Netgalley for my gifted e-arc. I'm so glad that the marketing team reached out to offer a copy. Still Life with Bones is my first nonfiction book I've read this year. It's a memoir written by a forensic anthropologist who goes to Guatemala and Argentina to recover bodies from mass graves.

Hagerty writes about the scientific part of her job and also about the emotional. She goes into details of the families that wait by the mass graves. They await to see if a loved one has been found even though they've been gone for decades. She shared a story about a girl and her dog in a town of Guatemala that I will never forget.

This book will say with me for a long time. My parents are from Central America so I knew as soon as I saw Guatemala in the synopsis that I wanted to read it. The book showed me that the war in these countries has been over for years, but the people are still suffering from so much trauma. Its still hard for them to talk about it.

I highlighted so much of this book and before I was done, I had to order a physical copy for myself. I really want to thank the author for giving these families a voice and letting their stories be told and not be forgotten. I learned about Myrna Mack and The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. These are women that deserve to be known for their work.

I highly recommend this book specially to someone that would like to learn more about Latin American history that we are not taught in school.

I'm sure this book will be in my top 5 books that I read this year.

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on the human condition I’ve ever read.

[Renee Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

At any given moment, somewhere in the world, someone is being murdered because of their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc. There's no concrete reason; they are just in the way of whatever regime is drunk with their own sadistic power over everything in their pathway. Terror for terror's sake, sometimes.

Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains is the result of Alexa Hagerty's field work toward her graduate degree in anthropology. She spent time with human rights' organizations in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Columbia, where the prolific killings that have taken place since 1960 provide ample real world experience. Her career focus was social anthropology, so she not only learned to dig up and analyze skeletal remains, but she recorded firsthand accounts of atrocities the people there endured. Both aspects of the work affected her deeply.

Given the vast populations of humans that have lived and died throughout history, there's probably almost no place on Earth that someone hasn't died--many due to violence of some sort--but due to the sheer number of years since their deaths, you won't find any bones if you decide to start digging. And it never occurs to us to wonder about that bit of ground where we ply our shovels to plant something, because they are lost to history and forgotten. In places like Guatemala, that is not the case. People ARE lost--40,000 of them--but they are not forgotten. They are "The Disappeared." They have been missing for a long time, but they have families who love them, remember them, and need closure. There are many anthropologists working on recovering and identifying the dead from multiple mass graves, and when they are successful, the families can give their loved ones a proper burial.

Prepare to be disheartened about the state of human nature when you read this. The large superpower countries see these little nations as pawns in their tug of war between democracy and communism, jumping in like a game of Risk, making sure their faction is well armed. There is no safety for the average person at that point, as both sides view them with suspicion, and decide these farmers need to be kidnaped, tortured, killed, and hidden. Did our presidents know about these evil and sadistic practices? Yes, apparently they did. And so did many in the Catholic church, including, possibly, Pope Francis. And when you move far down the chain of power to the actual torturers, you learn of a doctor who helped with the Venezuelan death flights, where people were pushed out of planes high over the ocean to die on impact, conveniently disposing of the body at the same time. This doctor told the detained he was giving them a vaccine before their transfer to another facility, and then actually gave them a sedative so they would be unresisting. He went along on the flight and gave them a second injection, and then closed himself in the cockpit prior to them being dropped out of the plane, because then it didn't violate his Hippocratic oath. That's one of many accounts of La Violencia presented; there are soooo many.

The forensics information covered, which was the draw for me, was interesting. The history lesson, a horrific shock. The Audible Audio was a top notch narration, though I found it hard to keep track of all the Hispanic names.

[Khalida Jabarzai · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book made me cry in public. it’s so beautifully written and delicately approached. it felt like i was reading a devastating poem, written to honour the internationally forgotten and the often ignored victims, all whilst remaining a deeply informative text.

you’d think that someone who tries to consistently engage with her position as a white woman in anthropology throughout her book, an identity that draws her to her conclusion of “stepping away from exhumations to work to prevent genocides instead” that she would be incredibly critical and vocal of the genocide Palestinians are currently experiencing. you’d assume, as any sane person would, that her work to “prevent genocides from taking place” would extend to communities ACROSS THE GLOBE as opposed to focusing simply on South America, especially since she herself references (in more than a couple of sentences) other regions where the work of exhumations is needed for the same reasons. you wouldn’t be wrong to assume that there may be a mention here or there of the plight of Palestinians on her socials, littered throughout her constant promoting of her book.

as ever, my thoughts on anthropology as a troubling field filled (unfortunately) with hypocrites and ethically corrupt individuals, able to remain wilfully ignorant of the plight of others (ironically a stance that hagerty herself engages with and attempts to unpick) is one that is further affirmed.

i wonder if they can see their own hypocrisy. i wonder if they think they’re saviours.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started really strong, but the last third was a mix of unclear timelines, names, and slightly unnecessary insertion of analysis, using Freud and others. Interesting read that makes me want to learn more about the history of Guatemala and Argentina, as well as forensic anthropology.

[CatReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. A well-written book - part memoir, part behind-the-scenes look at forensic anthropology and the personalities who are drawn to this challenging work, part narrative on various modern-day genocides - with all parts cohering nicely. The focus of the book is on the author's work excavating and identifying remains of those murdered in genocides in Guatemala and Argentina in the last ~50 years, and the social and cultural impact of notifying surviving family members that their deceased relatives had been found (or not). Hagerty does a very nice job of talking about the emotional toll those work takes (in her own experience and that of her colleagues), but how the emotion is key to being able to do the work well.

Further reading:
The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein
Personal Effects: What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me About Caring for the Living by Robert Jensen
Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist by Richard Shepherd
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases by Deborah Halber
Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases by Paul Holes

[tori faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

as an anthropology student who wants to work in the human rights/forensics sphere, this book was very sobering and enlightening. the way alexa hagerty crafts her chapters was amazing, and the way she kept switching from the past to the present felt incredibly cinematic. i also want to point out the great amount of respect and care she had when speaking about tragedies, the families of victims, and the people she worked with. overall, this was an amazing book and i would give it a 4.5 if i could

[Gideon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immediately go and find a copy, buy it, go to the library, do what you need to do.

I've been disappointed by well reviewed non-fiction before - it is impossible to be anything less than deeply moved by this book. This will be one of my books of the year, calling it now. This book will follow me for a long while, and I will be grateful for all that it has given me.

[Amy Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere between 3-4 stars

Objectively this is good. From my reading experience perspective, I personally didn’t read this at the right time per my mental state (the world is shit and this is too relevant to the times) and I think I would’ve preferred a short form podcast vs a long form book.

Either way, I’m now going to be keeping my eyes out for stories about anthropologists working on Gaza.

-

“The catastrophic violence recounted in this book is in the past, but the world is still learning painful lessons about how tyranny leads to austerity.”

[livvy · Rating 5 out of 5]

should be required reading for everyone studying anthropology, sociology, and history

[Gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a helpful follow-up to Haley Cohen Gilliland’s book on the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children. Kenzie, my new Goodreads buddy, recommended this to me, and you can read their thoughts here. Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains is the sort of book I might have been too scared to pick up in prior years, but I am *DETERMINED* that 2025 will be the year I learn about science!!! In Still Life with Bones, Hagerty widens her scope to focus not just on the desaparecidos in Argentina, but also on the victims of La Violencia in Guatemala.

The profession of exhumation
In addition to the “how” of exhumation, Alexa Hagerty’s book also explains the “why.” As an anthropologist who works closely with forensic teams, Hagerty and her colleagues must learn to balance their professional scrutiny of a corpse with their personal respect for the actual human being that used to animate the body they’re now examining. This is more pressure than I would have thought, because of the “race against the clock” to identify corpses while their relatives are still living, and because of the continued persecution even after a genocide is marked as “over.” Living with that sort of terror is a wound that never heals, particularly when people are still living right next door to their loved ones’ murderers!! All this makes exhumation, even just for the sake of closure, dangerous work. In Guatemala, many archaeologists were receiving DEATH THREATS, while in Argentina, the forensic specialists and judges and coroners were part of the police, and often complicit in the disappearances. Especially in Argentina, which experienced such frequent regime shifts, many people were scared that if they helped the forensic teams now, they might be paying for it a few years down the road.

In addition to discussing the bravery of forensic workers, Hagerty also shows the beauty of the field of forensic anthropology. I didn’t realize that you can literally tell if someone was a weaver, tailor, corset-wearer, cow milker, or probably also an iPhone user, just through their bones! I loved her discussion of how oral histories are frequently used to locate, identify, and contextualize human remains. Sometimes the forensic teams know who to look for because the family tells them they’d had a childhood accident that shaped their bones, and sometimes the teams knew where to look because of a mother’s dream about her child’s grave. What’s more, Hagerty recognizes that even with the growing precision of her field, some mourners find that seeing their loved ones’ rings or clothing can feel more important than DNA results or looking at a loved one’s skull. I am in a field that is often prone to technocratic hubris, and prior to this book, I’d largely assumed forensic anthropology would be even worse at this than planners are. So, it was incredibly refreshing to hear Hagerty’s humility in her work, and willingness to truly partner with the families in these searches.

Just horrendous layers of oppression!
Hagerty draws on everyone from philosophers to theologians to articulate why disappearance is such a unique evil (read: because it takes away both the right to life AND the right of death.) She layers in lots of different sources for nearly every part of this book, really trying to provide a wide scope or full picture of why these issues matter, and how they impact other elements of our world. For instance, before showing some of the promising ways forensic teams are now working with families, she also discusses the terrible legacy of nonconsensual use of corpses from oppressed communities for forensic research.

She also talks about the ways that oppressed communities were uniquely targeted for genocide in the places she worked. In Guatemala, many victims of La Violencia were indigenous, including the Kʼicheʼ and Qʼeqchiʼ people; in Argentina, Jewish people were much more likely to be amongst the desaparecidos than you would think from their share of the population. Hagerty described another debate I’d never have considered, which is whether governments should even prioritize exhumations when areas have so many other needs: schools, food, etc. There is a huge disparity between wealthier and poorer countries in the storage of unidentified remains and frequency of testing, for instance.

Finally, once again, the US WAS FOUND DIRECTLY AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME. We knew about this from A Flower Traveled in My Blood’s description of Operation Condor, but that was in South America. Sure enough though, the US was also condoning Rios Montt’s genocidal regime in Guatemala, just to keep out a communist leader because THAT leader would’ve shut down an American corporation, Chiquita’s, profits!!!!

Picking up where A Flower Traveled in My Blood left off
Fortunately, Hagerty describes some topics that I felt Haley Cohen Gilliland excluded from A Flower Traveled in My Blood. For instance, Hagerty is the only one of the two authors to call attention to the experiences of the non-disappeared children who had to watch their parents devote so much time to chasing after the daughters they’d lost. She also provides a compassionate lens towards the (grand)children felt abandoned or disappointed by their parents’ political choices, which seemed to supersede the responsibility to keep one’s child safe. These are thorny topics that I certainly have no moral authority on, but I was really glad Hagerty made space for them in her book!

I also enjoyed reading Chapter 10, where Hagerty explains the split between the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the Abuelas. Unlike HCG, she actually fully explains WHY the Madres were against exhumation, which turned out to be pretty compelling. Basically, the Madres didn’t believe in exhumation because they wanted to make sure the desaparecidos didn’t become a problem that was “put to bed” so people would go back to ignoring the violence:

"Some Madres saw exhumations as a surreptitious attempt to convert mass atrocity into private grief...Such a stance rejects closure in favor of the wound left purposely open, a willful political melancholia."

It’s a sort of withholding that brings to mind some of the things I learned in Myisha Cherry’s The Failures of Forgiveness. Speaking of forgiveness, Hagerty also has more detail on the Catholic Church’s role in the genocide, even talking about what Pope Francis may or may not have known. You could argue in HCG’s defense that this is not required coverage in a book solely about the Abuelas, but I definitely appreciated the additional attention to it in Still Life with Bones.

Final thoughts and complaints
There were lots of interesting facts in Still Life with Bones, but it never cohered for me narratively. There’s just a level of organization, threading of information, and honestly staying on topic that I don’t think Hagerty achieved. Not to be rude, but sometimes when she started sharing her personal stories or opinions, I just didn’t understand how it was relevant to the book.

Finally, I would definitely encourage people to read claud’s review, which points of the concerning omission of the present genocide in Palestine from this author’s recent work and/or social media presence. I know what people might say, “this book was published in March 2023, and focuses on Guatemala and Argentina!” However, Hagerty goes on LOTS of detours in Still Life with Bones, and mentions several other countries with genocidal regimes at least in passing. What’s more, Hagerty mentions at the end that her future research will be about how the surveillance state is used to violate human rights. Given how the Israeli government (thanks to American companies like Google) is ground-zero for using surveillance tech to literally facilitate state-sanctioned murder, you would think that might be worth also mentioning in the end notes, or maybe even publishing a current piece about. To be fair, I don’t know enough about this lady to say she isn’t working on a book about all this right now, but it still seems like something might have made its way into this current book, since she didn’t leave out any other rabbitholes.

[Fleur Booth · Rating 5 out of 5]

harrowing especially to read on my holidays but worth it to be exposed

[AnSmellica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh. Oh. Oh. This was heartbreaking and poetic. Hagerty reminds us that as long as our bones remain, they have stories to tell; this is the story of the bones of the desaparecidos, and the anthropologists who search for, interpret, and translate them.
This book made me weep. The writing is lyrical and thoughtful; it reflects the reverence and respect with which she treats the remains of victims in her forensic work at mass gravesites. She tells the story of her training, exhuming and identifying the bones of victims of (u.s. backed/influenced) genocides in Guatemala and Argentina.
Her (anthropologically informed) musings on collective/individual grief, mourning, state backed violence, dreams, ritual, and hope are haunting and provocative. She doesn't sacrifice metaphor for fact (the book is full of both) and that lends to so much more truth than if it had been exclusively clinical. And that's part of her point! You can't be too clinical when you're working with such anguished evidence; they are our remains, they are us. They are ours, and telling their stories can compel us to leave better stories for the future.
“The dead whisper to me that it didn’t have to be this way. The massacres, secret prisons and hidden graves, all the terror and loss. Another world is possible.”

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

a phenomenal read that seeks to capture the blend of sacred and scientific in forensic anthropology in Guatemala and Argentina. I really appreciate the depth of the author's research and how much is covered in terms of both the history of violence as well as the history of human relationships with the dead. sometimes I don't enjoy when an author discusses their own experiences in these kinds of books, but I think hagerty does it very intentionally here to show the human impact of working in this field. this was very moving and left me with a lot to think about.

[Ashley Grospitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Here, [exhuming in a well], time is reversed; we move toward the past, digging through the years, the strata of violence”

“Centimeter by centimeter, with brushes and trowels, they work against impunity and forgetting”

“[This energy] moves in us, through us, and between us, as we surface between ancestor and progeny, between those who came before and those who will come after, as we float together in this vanishing moment”

[Michael Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this book for New Scientist. I said: “It is moving and beautiful, harrowing and horrifying.”

Full review: https://www.newscientist.com/article/...

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to about half of the audiobook. Even though I was listening, much of the writing really moved me. I felt like I was robbing myself of the full experience, so I got a physical copy from the library to finish the second half. Truly a gorgeous book.

[Chase]

The book was good but as some other reviews noted the author’s silence on ongoing genocides makes it feel inauthentic.

[Aike · Rating 5 out of 5]

i do not (yet) have words to express what this book did but i thought it was absolutely brilliant, so incredibly well-written, Hagerty masterfully weaved together political and historical facts with the staggering cruel facts of mass violence and the personal testimonies of those who lived and had to live through it, or did not survive. this book touched so many topics i could talk about for ages, it has changed and formed my thoughts and im pretty sure i will be referring to it again and again. - Hagerty's feel for language and where language does not reach (her description of touch as necessary in forensic research...), the crash of science/academia with the reality of research in place, and the way in which forensic teams found ways to work with local people, the dreams and hauntings, the importance of funeral rituals, her descriptions of the madres and rebellion/activism.. and it hit me hard how Hagerty is describing the aftermath, 'what remains', of violence and genocide as it is happening right now, as we can see happening at this moment.
even though my job is VERY different, on a personal note i felt so seen by the way Hagerty describes working with skeletons, and how these bones moved from 'objects to analyse' to 'people telling a story' and i was really touched by her descriptions of the research teams and life/work in the lab, as well as her own search for finding a way to 'deal' with it and how her colleagues found these ways.

[Minh Anh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a convergence of all the topics that move me deeply. As someone who had pursued a biomedical engineering degree to help people (only to find that even among these fields, the care and personhood can be so separated from the science of bodies), I am touched by the way Hagerty locates the act of exhumation as an academic study and the ritualistic restoration of humanity. Just as much as I was engrossed in the historical and analytic description of the bones and their contexts, I am also mesmerized by Hagerty's intimate perspective, her philosophical musings, her poetic writing on how she was moved by her objects (people, stories, lives) of study (which is very similar to another favorite book of mine All the Living and the Dead). The book is understandably heavy, as it was the heaviness and absurdity of genocide (in the wake of what has been and is still happening in Gaza and Palestine) that I sought out this book. Grief and losses are topics close to my heart: in the presence of immense loss and pain testified as the words on the page, I welcome the waves of grief as they come through my body with these living bones--first, as a drawn-out breath, bringing a sting to the eyes, and finally, landing in an endless pit in my chest.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

social anthropological examination of the exhumation of mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina - a profoundly upsetting but vastly important book.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best nonfiction books I've read. It felt like Hagerty brought me with her to her time studying and digging in Guatemala and Argentina. She writes with immense care about the disappeared, their families, and the bones she helps exhume.

[Athena · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are no words to describe how this book made me feel. Maybe "gut punch"? "Devastated"? Easily the best book I've read so far in 2024.