Still Life with Bones

Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

By: Alexa Hagerty

Narrated by: Rose Akroyd

Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2023 Alexa Hagerty (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Haunted and fascinating . . . lyrical . . . The stories of these excavators of the past are told compellingly in Still Life with Bones.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Moving, profound and very readable . . . There’s a spiritual element as [Hagerty] speaks of learning to ‘read’ the bones and the ghosts that result.”—Financial Times

“In this meditative ethnography, a social anthropologist . . . delicately explores the art, the science, and the sacredness of exhumation in the aftermath of genocide. . . . Throughout the book, just as in forensics, ‘the ritual and the analytical buzz in electric proximity.’”—The New Yorker

Disturbing and Hard to Listen To

But people who care about other people should consider this book as an important book to listen to. Particularly disturbing is the story of Argentina’s violence in the 70’s and it’s roots in ideology. It chills me to the core due to the complicity of the Catholic Church in Argentina and the horrifying parallels between the right wing in Argentina in the 70’s and the American right wing today. If you don’t think government sponsored mass murder can’t happen here, listen and think carefully. Guatemala was horrifying too, but in my opinion less about ideology and more about greed and power, aided and abetted by the American political establishment to protect a few American companies.

WOW!

Wow, just wow. I finished this book in 1 day and I plan on reading it again. Cover to Cover this book accurately portrays multiple human conditions and I am dumbfounded.

Very informative- learned a lot.

Liked the performer’s voice, interesting subject matter, not something you hear about in your every day