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Top of the pile
92
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
96/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Alexa Hagerty
Publisher:
Crown
Date:
March 14, 2023
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.
What The Reviewers Say
One team of grave detectives told Hagerty that it takes a month per body to exhume and analyse: a doomed race against time.
The stories of these excavators of the past are told compellingly in Still Life With Bones, along with the stories of those willing, despite death threats and intimidation, to defy the authorities who abducted and murdered their loved ones. Hagerty understands that the bones of the violated dead do not murmur or sing to us unless the living struggle day after day against forgetfulness, against the impunity of other sorts of hands that also proliferate in her book.
Woven throughout these memories and lyrical reflections on bones, anthropology and storytelling are the actual horrors that some particular bones reveal.
Hagerty is soulful but unsentimental, and she closes with just the right conundrum: With so much knowledge of horrific crimes, how can one return to 'the manicured lawns and temperature-controlled archives of the university'? A powerful meditation on life, death, and sorting out what can be saved of death in life..
