Very somber, very important read. It was pretty grim, but the author did include pockets of glimmers of hope for finding future remains in South America. Written beautifully in terms of human rights. 4 stars.

I started reading this first as an ebook then I switched to audiobook and felt that the audio really adds to the story and makes you forget that this isn't fictional. I thought it was astonishing to hear about the genocides happening in South America and not just get the history but also people's perspectives on what was occurring. I loved how this book shows the power of bones not just for anthropology purposes but also for the healing of communities.

Still Life With Bones Alexa Hagerty


During the Guatemalan Civil War, approximately 140,000-200,000 people, many of them civilians, lost their lives. Entire villages were executed. Forensic scientist Alexa Hagerty
had the arduous job of identifying the remains that have been found. Making connections between one of the almost 50,000 individuals who were "disappeared" and these remains was almost, but not quite impossible.

Hagerty says something to the effect that it was not the lack of hope that was the most heartbreaking thing she had to face. She says the most heartbreaking thing she had to face was the tiny bit of hope cherished by family members of the ones who were never seen again, that their loved ones' remains will be found and can be laid to rest.

This memoir is moving on a personal level and fascinating on a factual level.

I've done a fair bit of reading general-audience forensic anthropology both in criminal and in human rights contexts. I respect those who have trained themselves to "listen" to bones, flesh, soil, and insect activity in order to "set things right"—to tell the tale of what happened and to seek justice. The titles by forensic anthropologists working in the criminal field are generally presented as series of puzzles. Who was this person? What happened? These titles are often reflective in interesting ways, but each case is separated from others, so one gets a string of short narratives, rather than a longer, single narrative.

The books with a broader, human rights focus elicit an ongoing sort of reflection—cumulative, if you will. That's very much the case for Alexa Hagerty's Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Hagerty's book focus on two genocides, in Guatemala and in Argentina. She was still a graduate student when she did this work, though the book reflects her broader, current professional knowledge. She worked on other genocides, but now works in human rights research outside of the forensic realm.

The focus on two regions allows Hagerty time to give us a history of the relatively recent field of human rights forensic anthropology and its application to crimes against humanity. She lets us get to know people working in this field over time, who had the audacity to try to document systems of violence. In the two regions she explores, those who began this work had some guidance from professional forensic anthropologists, but were generally young, college-age individuals who had the courage to challenge regimes still very much in place, even if they'd ostensibly been ended.

Hagerty also provides historical information that contextualizes these atrocities so that they become reflections on the ways we can convince ourselves that a genocide is working toward a "good" of some sort. (I'm using "we" here because many of us might embrace, or at least tolerate, genocide if we were raised within a value system that saw it as achieving a public good. I hope that wouldn't be true for me, but I don't think I can be sanguine and assume my hands would remain clean in other circumstances.)

Hagerty reflects on what it means to disinter and reinter those killed by genocide. The work can provide information, but she's less certain that it provides closure in the sense that many claim it does. Families "lucky" enough to have a disappeared loved one identified have an opportunity to enact funerary rituals, but there is no bringing the dead back. In some cases, relatives embrace forensic investigation. In Guatemala in particular families or communities can be present during disinterments, allowing a kind of kind of witnessing that can include testimony as the violent past is being uncovered. This is a rarity in a field where the demands of science have tended to put barriers between anthropologists and affected individuals.

I could go on here, but Hagerty says all of this better, more powerfully, and with more carefully selected detail than I possibly can. If you are the sort who asks questions about what it means to be human, what we are capable of—both good and bad—and the way systems make violence possible, you will want to read Still Life with Bones. Hagerty is an effective, thoughtful companion through this journey.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

Alexa Hegarty’s Still Life with Bones is very well described by its subtitle: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Her book, while at times difficult to read, as anything on this topic should be, seems incredibly well done to this reader. Hegarty, an anthropologist pursuing an advanced degree, takes time away from studying to explore her field of interest and travel to South America which has seen multiple examples of state sponsored terrorism since approximately the 1960s. Out of this has grown an increasing volume of missing people, often called the “the disappeared.”

Hegarty’s purpose: to work with the forensic scientists, the archaeologists, the local historians, families, to learn more about the actual terror campaigns and perpetrators, their victims, and learn more about and from those left behind, while joining the search for the missing…hundreds of thousands in multiple countries, and return as many as possible to their families.

I very highly recommend this book to anyone interested in history. While it deals with events primarily in Guatemala and Argentina, the situations, issues, and tactics used are being applied now around the world, wherever similar terror tactics and massacres have taken people away from their lives and families. While it is difficult reading at times, I believe it is also important.

A copy of this book was provided by Crown books/Random House through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

"Still Life with Bones" by Alexa Hagerty was a powerful, difficult at times, honest and eye-opening novel about the Genocides in South America, told from a scientist's point of view, via exploring the bone remains and excavating sites. Insightful and with good balance between science angle and human prospective. Thank you NetGalley, the author and publisher for the copy for review. All opinions are my own.

Once while attending a lecture in San Francisco, I found myself becoming more alert when the speaker at the lectern introduced genocide into his presentation. I straightened a little in my seat but to my dismay, he didn’t address genocide as a brutal system of erasure but rather its tangential relationship to behavior, particularly what happens in the brain of mass murderers. The fact is genocide is unspeakable and so in the United States mostly it isn’t spoken of. Because genocide is about silence as much as it is about death Alexa Hagerty’s “Still Life with Bones; Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains” is critical reading. It will not keep genocide quiet. The story alternates between the science of anthropology, the trauma of the murdered, and the genocidal history of Guatemala and Argentina illustrating both symmetry and chasms.

After arriving in El Quiché, Guatemala, grad-student Alexa Hagerty starts digging trenches to recover dead bodies. In the caked dirt she approaches her work meticulously. This is a somber exercise of repetition and resilience because genocides are never finalized. Their legacy of torture, disappearance, murder, and execution transforms into generational trauma.

Hagerty works side by side with members of the highly respected Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) who try to dissuade her from any romantic notions of saviorism. One of the Guatemalan team members warns, “Even if 30 forensic teams worked for 30 years, that still wouldn’t be enough resources or time to exhume all the mass graves in Guatemala”.

FAFG has recovered 3,781 bodies in 30 years. It’s estimated it would take nearly 4,000 years to identify every disappeared person in Guatemala. “There is urgency to the work,” Hagerty writes. “Forensic teams are racing against the clock to find and return the missing.” The mission is to heal families and to identify evidence for criminal trials.

If you can’t understand the bones as people who are missing and loved, with a mother and father standing by the edge of the grave waiting, you can’t do this work. If you can’t understand the bones as evidence to be analyzed and examined, you can’t do this work. You must touch bones and be touched by them. You must be able to drink your tea with the dead. Alexa Hagerty


Uncomfortable using the pickax to root through the dirt, imagining hitting a body, Hagerty’s repetitive prayer is “Don’t faint. Don’t vomit.” Fearing the perception of being the weak-minded girl if she comes undone after encountering a particularly horrifying body or some errant piece of skin, she sucks into her veins, angst. Later, she is aware of the ramification if she doesn’t cry, if she is surrounded by so much death she doesn’t feel anything. Numbness is as traumatic a condition as hysteria.

A social anthropologist, Hagerty is a recorder of oral history. She’s an ethnographic interviewer and not a forensic anthropologist. Acutely aware of the distinction and of her presence being trivialized, she frets about how she will be perceived. Yet the experience in Guatemala is unparalleled for an American anthropology student.

Guatemala is a blood-soaked country mired in historical trauma. There are the 200,000 dead because of the civil war, the buried bodies in an array of hidden places. Then there is the everyday dead that adds weight to the numbers. The line between the two is both hazy and symbolic. The United Nations once reported that Guatemala was a “good place to commit murder.” Peacetime homicide rates are out of control. Hagerty observes how shopkeepers pass sodas and cigarettes through bars to customers. She was shaken when one of her team members was stabbed seventeen times for his wallet and his car.

She starts having trouble sleeping. It’s insomnia but more. She dreams of dead bodies, cries in her sleep, is perpetually anxious and nervous, and feels nauseous enough to vomit. How the victims died, and the various ways a human can be murdered, haunts her as if their ghosts are whispering in her ear and telling Hagerty their tragic story of glistening pain and catastrophe. Beaten with pipes. Shot in the head. Shot in the back while running. Hagerty’s mind plays tricks with her brain, what psychologists refer to as mind wandering. She imagines she is in love. Or she replays upon a loop a fond memory. She fantasizes about motherhood and then just as quickly doubts herself. It’s a cruel world where a soldier can break a child’s spine against a tree. Sleep is impossible.

While her team members joke about their therapist- Jameson Whiskey- Alexa reminds herself that forensic exhumation is justice work. In the lab, wash the skull. Arrange the bones in anatomical order as if they were lying on their back palms up, a routine called "articulating the bones."

Forensic anthropology glistens under Hagerty's pen. She speaks of rural women and how their backs and feet and legs, aching under the weight of physical exertion, have reshaped their bones. Bones are also impacted by famine- not a surprise for those who have studied poverty and observed bone rickets in the lowborn. Forensic anthropologists can tell by the bone shape if someone made their money as a weaver; weavers kneel in front of the loom, and their knees and shin, and feet coordinate differently. They can tell if the victim had been a tailor because tailors often have grooves in their incisors from holding pins in their mouths.

Hagerty’s writing is at its most spare and elegant when writing about the dressing of Doña Asunción’s bones, a cultural custom. “It goes against some sense I have” she confesses “that remains are private, but there they are exposed for all to see." In a tender parallel illustrating the emotional complexity of Hagerty’s personal and professional life and the cultural differences, she writes of her own father and how it felt to have a box with his ashes inside.

“I was astounded that a man could be reduced to something so small…the box was heavy. I have thought of that blue box often in Guatemala.” Years earlier while visiting her father at the age of seventeen Alexa nearly died from an asthma attack. Her father performed CPR. Then seventeen years later her father died. “The absence of my father’s body, the note, the autopsy that probably took place, and the box of ashes he was reduced to, stirred something in me: some primordial question about the dead:

Rosa Rufina Betti de Casagrande disappeared in 1976. There was information that she was in an unmarked Argentinian grave. Rosa’s mother and father arrived to see what they hoped was the remains of their daughter. During the dig, the color of the dirt transformed. Not unusual. A bone was discovered and stuck to it was an earthworm. Then the cranium and a bullet hole over the eye. It was the skeleton of a young woman. Seven hours later, the skeleton was photographed, and the remains were taken to a Buenos Aires morgue for further examination.

Such is the work of forensic anthropologists.

When I was twelve years old, I had a chunk of bone removed from my leg, beneath my knee, and above my ankle because of an infection called osteomyelitis. The orthopedic surgeon said if I stayed off my leg for three months the two bone pieces would fuse together. I was still growing. My impression of my butchered bone was that it was a flower with a tough root. Once the cast was removed, I owned a five-inch scar from the surgery, visible to the world, my personal mark.

But what of the invisible scars and marks that genocide creates, the seen but unseen bits of detritus?

“Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains” isn’t a story where at its end you muse 'there but the grace of God go I'. It’s not an I story. It is about us. Us the world. And it felt theological, some pages more than others, with several questions hovering: can the murdered be reborn? Can families be renewed? And can scientists rewrite history? The notes at the back of the book are riveting and contextualize the historical relevance of Argentina and Guatemala while providing an academic window for further study.

I found myself mulling over a few things a day after the entire read was done. The existence of sinful Catholic priests who were enablers and allies to the abusers. They furthered the genocide while the sheer determination of the mothers simply refused to rest; they gathered and protested and screamed the names of their disappeared and discarded children. They were the genocide’s light supported by the yeoman work of forensic anthropologists with a mantra. Piece together a story of murder, crime, and a family: tocar para ver. Touch to see.

Excellently documented and an example of why we need to shine a million rays of light on violent cruelty, the elegiacal voice of such a startling document underscores cultural failure. The failure of world governments to stop despicable men and the failure of science to recover all the murdered, and the failure of the rest of the world- we practice deception. I was mostly struck by the story’s irony that the scientists touch bones in the light and the cruel touch the dead in the dark and torment the living. The story’s pain is its intimacy and more than once I was reminded of Toni Morrison’s title character Beloved who returned from the dead because she, as Morrison wrote, “died bad.” Plenty die bad in Hagerty’s story, and the response to their exigent suffering depends on your trigger of such things. Grief, science, or hope?

For me, it was grief and optimism. I’m personally acquainted with the awful stamp of murder and what it does to a family, so I innately identified with the families. But ultimately, I landed on what I wanted the world to be filled with: hope. Forensic anthropologists are the real priests, and their dedication pulsates throughout the painful fugue of beleaguered families. Their work is optimistic, albeit an imperfect lens but it bestows calm. Something is being done about catastrophic horror. Someone is being healed because of it. The families of the dead are being listened to.

Thank you to the publisher for access to this book. I'm currently wrapping up medical school (and am taking a forensic pathology class currently), so this book was very relevant to my interests. This book is very dark and haunting but I believe can give some hope to those wishing to heal from the trauma of state sanctioned violence. Very well written.

This was a really lovely book that gave me really good insight into the life of a forensic anthropologist as they work through these horrific events. As someone who had considered the career, it made me wish that I had followed my heart because while it is an emotional job and a lot of hard work both mentally and physically, it also seems quite rewarding when you can uncover the events and give families that peace of exactly what happened to their loved ones so they could be properly buried, grieved, and remembered.

A poignant and hard-hitting nonfiction title that takes the time to do emotional justice to its source material. Very solid writing work. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity with this title.

So powerful. I love getting to learn about how humans handle death and I loved getting to learn about the power of bones.

This book is informative and somber. Well-written and researched, Alexa Hagerty brought me fully into the dirt and muck of mass exhumations and into the mental toll such work takes. Hagerty easily intertwines the mass graves and the current politics and issues around the historical events, and the historical events themselves. As someone who isn't at all familiar with archeology or exhumation and forensic theory, the conversations around the 'pros' or 'cons' of exhumations and other theoretical issues in the field are thorough but easy to follow even as an outsider to the field. I so appreciate this book for the work it is doing concerning the history of mass executions and how societies seek justice and reconciliation. Well-executed and thoughtfully structured, Hagerty's work is a welcome addition to this subject.

Thank you for letting me read this arc!!

This is my first nonfiction of the year and I was blow away. Alexa Hagerty wrote a beautiful heartfelt book of Guatemala and Nicaragua. It is informative piece of the different aspects of violence and the aftermath.

A quote that really stuck with me was “ Smooth,rough, pitted, granular, gritty, rugged, ridged, undulating, grooved, sharped, creased, curved - the shapes and texture of bone carry messages for those who can read them. The art of forensics touch is honed through years of practice”.
This is how anthropology helps us find answers and stories we might not want to learn but need to. We need to stay informed of historical facts.

Thank you @Crown Publishing and Netgalley for my gifted e-arc. I'm so glad that the marketing team reached out to offer a copy. Still Life with Bones is my first nonfiction book I've read this year. It's a memoir written by a forensic anthropologist who goes to Guatemala and Argentina to recover bodies from mass graves.

Hagerty writes about the scientific part of her job and also about the emotional. She goes into details of the families that wait by the mass graves. They await to see if a loved one has been found even though they've been gone for decades. She shared a story about a girl and her dog in a town of Guatemala that I will never forget.

This book will say with me for a long time. My parents are from Central America so I knew as soon as I saw Guatemala in the synopsis that I wanted to read it. The book showed me that the war in these countries has been over for years, but the people are still suffering from so much trauma. Its still hard for them to talk about it.

I highlighted so much of this book and before I was done, I had to order a physical copy for myself. I really want to thank the author for giving these families a voice and letting their stories be told and not be forgotten. I learned about Myrna Mack and The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. These are women that deserve to be known for their work.

I highly recommend this book specially to someone that would like to learn more about Latin American history that we are not taught in school.

I'm sure this book will be in my top 5 books that I read this year.

Know that it takes a bit of commitment to read this thoughtful and distressing memoir by a forensic anthropologist who has spent her career trying to answer the question of what happened those who were disappeared during political upheaval. Hagerty does an excellent job of setting the scene- explaining what happened in Guatemala and Argentina- and in bringing the victims to life even as she works through the tangles of their bones. It's both fascinating and horrifying but an important contribution. Thanks to Netgalley for the arc.

Alexa Hagerty pours out elegiac thoughts in the pages of Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains, thoughts inspired by her fieldwork in rural Guatemala and various locations in Argentina. Hagerty spent long months assisting organizations like the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to recover the remains of people who were forcibly disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s in those countries. Unlike so many other books I’ve read about forensic anthropology, which focus on objective science, Still Life with Bones is a deeply thoughtful exploration of what bones represent. Hagerty’s mosaic essay-style allows her to jump from memories of being in the field; to interviewing survivors and relatives of the disappeared; to meditating on grief, memory, and justice. This book is a marvel.

Hagerty came to Guatemala and Argentina’s mass graves years after the (official) cessations of violence. Guatemala’s Civil War ended in 1996. Argentina’s so-called Dirty War ended in 1983. Even though truces were declared and, in some cases, trials were held to assign guilt, those conflicts left long physical and psychic scars on the people who survived and those who lost family and friends. Compounding the trauma is the fact that people were taken, killed, and buried in ways that make it very difficult to locate and identify remains. Hagerty remarks more than once that closure is something we can only bring ourselves; it cannot be given by others or by events. That said, being able to name and lay the remains of the dead to rest again can go a long way toward healing. I was fascinated by the variety of grief Hagerty presents in Still Life with Bones. There is a lot of sorrow. There is a lot of anger. There’s frustration and commemoration. People tell stories and give testimonios. Some people find closure by taking comfort in their memories of the dead; others still seek some kind of resolution.

Pervading much of this emotional tumult is the wearying fact that there is still so much work left to be done. Hagerty talks about graves, such as the Pozo de Vargas in Buenos Aires (Wikipedia article is in Spanish), that still contain thousands of remains that have been so jumbled together that identifying individuals is most likely impossible without DNA from relatives. There are also graves scattered around Guatemala and Argentina that haven’t even been located, let alone excavated. It’s little wonder that Hagerty talks about organizations like the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team with something like awe. Both groups were founded in the face of opposition by those who would prefer that the dead stay gone and buried. (Members still receive death threats even now.) They’ve struggled in punishing locations on shoestring budgets. The members’ indefatigable determination is nothing short of astonishing and profoundly inspiring.

Still Life with Bones is a moving read, one that forces us readers to think about what the dead might mean to us. I feel lucky that, in the course of my 41 years of life, I’ve only been to two memorial services. At those services, I thought about the stories that my dead took with them, that I would never hear again, and the worlds that were now gone. Although I spent a lot of time with this book, I can barely fathom what the peoples of Guatemala and Argentina had to live through during their times of violent upheaval, when their friends and relatives might be snatched off the street or from their homes and never be seen again. So many stories were lost and so many worlds were destroyed. Having their names and bones back seems like such a small thing, and yet, as Hagerty shows us, it can mean everything.

I’m so glad the marketing team permitted me to read an ARC of Hagerty’s book on NetGalley. This was a very educating and thoughtful book.
I greatly appreciated that author provided a brief yet thorough description of La Violencia in Guatemala and the history of military dictatorship in Argentina. I learned a lot I did not know about the conflict in Guatemala. I had some information on Argentina’s military dictatorship but it was helpful that the book refreshed my memory and gave me some new information on the topic. Without these background information, the book would not have been as impactful as it was.
I also appreciated reading about the work that the author and other anthropologists did. These are brave, compassionate individuals who helped provide peace and closure to countless families. Their work is so important and I’m glad that the author is drawing attention to them. I’m also grateful to the author for educating readers and drawing attention to the atrocities that were committed in Guatemala and Argentina. Though other countries have experienced similar tragedy, I think it’s imperative that others read and learn about these countries’ histories.
I’d like to read more about the topics that Hagerty discussed in her book. I am so appreciative that she included that “Notes” section at the end of her book. I encourage all to read this book.

Still Life with Bones is an excellent examination of the difficult and important work of forensic anthropology. Hagerty deftly describes her experiences learning from the world's experts in discovering, recovering, and identifying human remains that were "disappeared" during violence in Guatemala and Argentina. The book is able to explain the process of recovering and handling human remains while respecting and honoring these victims of violence. While Hagerty ultimately realizes this work is not something she can continue with, she luckily realized her own ability to illuminate this work through others through this fascinating, informative, and somber text.

This is a very thoughtful and nuanced account of forensic anthropology and, in particular, the work of anthropologists in documenting genocides in South America. Hagerty discusses the origins of forensic archaeology in Latin America, her own training, the complex social aspects of the work, and the political ramifications of it. For readers in the US, many of whom are unfamiliar with these genocides, this book provides a crucial history of them and what has ensued since, in the very brittle peaces in place in some areas. It also deromanticizes the work, which has been rather poorly represented in American TV and movies. This will be a good read for book groups and clubs, on campuses, and, to be honest, in ministries, as the book does not flinch from the evil done by the Catholic Church in these massacres.

I struggled to read this book. The parts I found engaging let the reader understand the everyday ins and outs of forensic recovery and the tedious and years long efforts to find names to the bones they uncover. Although it was hard to read the stories of the family members left behind, who are still struggling to come to terms with a loved one's disappearance (and most likely death) it became a struggle to read through the more academic parts of the book. This should be a textbook in a college or graduate level course covering the history of Guatemala and Argentina as well as death customs and the philosophy of grief and death from around the world. Pleasure reading this is not. If you were alive during the time periods discussed, you will remember the news coverage of these horrific events that still happen today. Hagerty provides a much more personal view of the events through her work and interviews with the families and in some cases, the victims themselves.