Still Life with Bones (B PB): A forensic quest for justice among Latin America’s mass graves

ONE OF THE NEW YORKER‘S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR
CHOSEN BY FINANCIAL TIMES‘ READERS’ FOR BEST BOOKS OF 2023
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS EDITOR’ S CHOICE

“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 loss and mourning.”

In this haunting and poetic account, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty joins forensic teams and families of the missing as they search for the hundreds of thousands victims of genocidal violence unleashed by authoritarian governments in Latin America.

In Guatemala and Argentina, she learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for evidence of torture and cause of death – hands bound by rope, cuts from machetes – but also for signs of a life lived: a weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by years of kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog.

Hagerty shows us how exhumation can bring meaning to families dealing with unimaginable loss and justice to societies in the aftermath of state terror and genocide. Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, grieving families, histories of violence, and her own forensic coming of age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.