Book review of Still Life With Bones by Alexa Hagerty

Dr. Alexa Hagerty, an affiliate fellow on the College of Cambridge and an anthropologist with a Ph.D. from Stanford, can learn bones. In Nonetheless Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Stays, Hagerty explores the shut connection between bones and phrases. Like phrases, bones may be articulated (organized right into a coherent kind, resembling a skeleton) and turn out to be articulate (able to clear expression). Utilizing sight, contact, odor and even sound, Hagerty can interpret the tales that bones conceal. For instance, she will be able to inform by contact if a bone’s fracture happened earlier than, throughout or after its proprietor’s dying. She will piece collectively the shattered remnants of a bit of lady’s cranium to disclose the bullet gap in the midst of her brow. She will even decide how an individual’s occupation formed their bones. A dairy employee may need compression fractures of their neck from leaning their face in opposition to a cow’s flank. A grooved incisor would possibly as soon as have held a tailor’s pins.

Nonetheless Life With Bones is partly a memoir of how Hagerty gained this extraordinary experience, recounting the bodily and emotionally draining work of meticulously looking for bones and figuring out the useless and the way they died. It sounds bleak, however there’s additionally pleasure in these pages: the camaraderie of comrades, the pleasant competitors amongst fellow college students and the enjoyment when a skeleton is reunited with the group who believed they might by no means see their beloved once more. 

Nonetheless, Nonetheless Life With Bones is greater than only a memoir. Woven all through these reminiscences and lyrical reflections on bones, anthropology and storytelling are the precise horrors that some explicit bones reveal. Hagerty did her fieldwork within the mass graves of Guatemala and Argentina; her topics are the victims of genocidal wars dedicated by dictators in opposition to these international locations’ residents. Her colleagues are forensic anthropologists dedicated to reclaiming the useless and returning them to their grieving households at nice private danger and price. Each fantastically written web page of this extraordinary ebook affirms the individuality of every sufferer, and honors the residing who serve them and their survivors.