Bone Woman: Among the Dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Croatia |
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Clea Koff
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Pages: 368 (Paperback)
ISBN: 1843541386
Pub: Atlantic Books
Pub date: 2004-04-22
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 195718
Editorial Review:
In 1996 Clea Koff, author of The Bone Woman, was a graduate student of prehistoric skeletons at Berkeley when she was invited to take part in a fact-finding mission in Rwanda for the UN War Crimes Tribunal. The questions she and the other forensic specialists were to answer were: who were the victims buried in a mass grave behind the Kibuye church, and how did they die? This encounter with genocide proved pivotal in Clea's decision to become a forensic anthropologist specialising in human rights. Over the next few years, she participated in six more UN fact-finding missions in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. She uncovered the wire-bound wrists of Srebrenica massacre victims, disinterred the body of a young man in southwestern Kosovo as his grandfather looked on in silence, and discovered among the bodies of hospital patients the curious case of a Croatian with x-rays stuffed down the back of his robe.
The Bone Woman is Koff's powerful, deeply personal account of her training in human rights forensic anthropology, her growing awareness of the human dimension of genocide, and her struggle to come to terms with her role in the reconciliation and healing process of a family--and a nation. Koff details, with a no-holds-barred frankness, what day-to-day life was like as part of a dedicated, multinational team of forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, pathologists, technicians, workers and soldiers: the harsh, sometimes terrifying and potentially violent conditions under which they lived and laboured, not to mention the old bugaboo of politics. She gives a clear, informed, insider's view of her work and her struggle to maintain the necessary professional distance while coming face-to-face with the obvious brutality of the victims' deaths and the pain of the survivors.
While there is much that is similar across these missions, Koff takes special care to emphasise what is distinct to each. Each killing field has its own story. Each victim is an individual whose personhood and personal history were to be erased and rendered anonymous. Yet at the same time, each story carries a universal warning that we all must heed, so as not to fall into the error of viewing what happened in a given place and time as an isolated incident that will never be repeated. --Diana Kuprel, Amazon.ca
Reader Reviews:
Worth reading (0/0 people found this helpful)
The Bone Woman is an incredibly well-written and poignant book written by the forensic anthropologist Clea Koff. The author talks about her work on mass graves in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo as part of UN International Criminal Tribunal investigations. It is hard to describe this book - I felt like I have undertaken a very long and exhausting journey. Ms Koff described her surroundings so well I feel as if I actually visited hot, leafy forests in Rwanda and cold, grey landscapes in the Balkans. There were times when I had to put this book down and simply process the information that I was reading. There is something about the human condition whereby we find it hard to imagine mass murder; we find it hard to comprehend the mechanics of taking the life of hundreds of people in one event; we find it hard to imagine that these were once people, to put a human face to the atrocity. In her book, Clea Koff does this for us - she paints a picture whereby the reader is finally able to comprehend and understand.
A truly gripping read. (8/9 people found this helpful)
This book is written with passion and honesty. Clea Koff was a young woman when she first went to Rwanda at the start of her odyssey that took her to the killing fields of Africa and Eastern Europe. However, she writes with the maturity and clarity of someone who has seen and experienced things that will forever be part of the brutal history of the 20th Century.
I found it difficult to put the book down, even when the subject matter was disturbing in the extreme. Koff writes clearly and without any glorification of what she saw, and she clearly revelled in the responsibility of her job.
A fascinating account of terrible events that have a frightening habit of happening again and again during conflicts across the globe.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Biography -> Women
Books -> Subjects -> Biography -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Health, Family & Lifestyle -> Medical & Healthcare Practitioners -> Other Branches of Medicine -> Forensics
Books -> Subjects -> Health, Family & Lifestyle -> Medical & Healthcare Practitioners -> Other Branches of Medicine -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Health, Family & Lifestyle -> Medical & Healthcare Practitioners -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Health, Family & Lifestyle -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Scientific, Technical & Medical -> Medicine & Nursing -> Medical Sciences A-Z -> Forensic Medicine
Books -> Subjects -> Scientific, Technical & Medical -> Medicine & Nursing -> Medical Sciences A-Z -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Scientific, Technical & Medical -> Medicine & Nursing -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Science & Nature -> Medicine -> Medical Sciences A-Z -> Forensic Medicine
Books -> Subjects -> Science & Nature -> General AAS
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