Bones tell stories. In Still Life with Bones, Hagerty (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) weaves together accounts of political violence, disappearances and deaths, exhumations, and families in Guatemala and Argentina who search for their loved ones. Working with forensic teams in labs and rural and urban exhumation sites, the author learned, multisensorially, the feel and look of bones that reveal different forms of violence, the backbreaking hours digging for remains often deep underground, the smells, the grief still expressed by families of the disappeared, and the ghosts and dreams that haunt. The book consists of 14 chapters plus an introduction and epilogue. Each chapter contains fragments that are carefully laid out to tell the history--la violencia in Guatemala and the Dirty War in Argentina--along with an account of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina; the discovery of surveillance records in Guatemala; the insights of team members involved with community-centered forensic practice; the author's personal experiences; and ruminations on mortuary rituals, grief, and memory. On occasion, bones (via DNA tests) do lead to identification and reburial by families, with closure for some. What remains is ongoing work and tenuous possibilities. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Carol Hendrickson, emerita, Marlboro Institute at Emerson College

"Bones are always joined to grief, memory, and ritual," contends anthropologist Hagerty in this searing report on the grueling labor and psychological stress of her time in Guatemala and Argentina excavating the mass graves of victims of political violence. Digging into the history of the two countries, the author discusses the Guatemalan government's massacre of tens of thousands of Maya people from the 1960s to 1996 and the Argentine military dictatorship's murder of dissidents from 1976 to 1983. She describes using DNA, oral histories, and fragments of clothing to identify victims and return the remains to families, noting that community members can sometimes recognize a body by the unique pattern on a handwoven huipil, a kind of traditional blouse. "To recognize a missing person in a bone is a difficult act of imagination," she muses, telling the story of a woman who struggled to make sense of her brother's death after a fragment of his pelvic bone was found in a mass grave. Hagerty never loses sight of the humanity of the dead and the pain felt by the survivors, nimbly weaving together political history and personal narratives to illuminate the difficult process of accounting for atrocities. Intense and emotional, this is a vital rumination on political violence. (Mar.)

As she excavates mass graves in Guatemala, Alexa Hagerty chants a kind of prayer: "Don't faint. Don't vomit." An anthropologist, Hagerty trains with forensic teams in Guatemala and Argentina, where twentieth-century governments committed genocide against their own citizens. With time, her visceral reaction to handling human bones morphs into care and empathy for the dead. The work is painstaking and grueling; it can take months or years to recover a body, identify it, and reunite the remains with family members. But doing so is crucial to the healing and empowerment of survivors and to seeking justice for state-sponsored atrocities. Community members share stories with the anthropologists of how the military tortured, terrorized, and disappeared family members and friends. Don Jaime, who tells Hagerty about the massacre of his village, says, "The world must not forget what has happened here." Readers of history, science, and true crime will find Hagerty's first book impactful and compelling. Her well-researched and accessible narrative ensures that the history and legacy of violence in Guatemala and Argentina will not be buried.

An anthropologist recounts sifting through the remains left by horrific crimes in Guatemala and Argentina. There have been numerous books on forensic anthropology in the last two decades, when DNA studies and other techniques have been refined for field and laboratory studies of crime. Clea Koff's The Bone Woman, for instance, describes research in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other killing fields. Hagerty's first book fits neatly in this tradition, distinguishing itself from other entries by its musings on the nature of political violence. The governor of Buenos Aires Province put it most graphically in the days of the military dictatorship: "First we will kill all of the subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those that remain indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid." Fortunately, the regime collapsed before his vision could be realized; unfortunately, many thousands of Argentinian citizens died, and Hagerty has worked diligently to identify them. The bloodbath was even worse in Guatemala, where, "in a country of eight million people, there were 200,000 dead" after years of government massacres meant to suppress civil unrest. As Hagerty uncovers mass graves and crawls into burial pits and remote caves full of bones, she reflects on the nature of her work, particularly how difficult it is to isolate single victims in a jumble of remains. "The excavation is three-dimensional, sculptural, a Rubik's Cube," she writes. Things become more clinical and even less human while cutting away pieces of bone in order to study the DNA, a reliable means of connecting a body to a name--"and with a name, a body can be given a proper burial." 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.