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librarymouse's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Prior to reading this book, I had no idea that the American-backed genocide of Mayans in Guatemala, nor the Nazi-affiliated disappearings in Argentina ever happened. In this book, Alexa Hagerty does a beautiful and poignant job exploring the atrocities and her experience exhuming the mass graves left in their wake at a human level. She breaks down the walls built up in many western minds between the body and the person they were; the stories they still have left to tell, exploring how that mental block helps and hinders in archeological and anthropological study. The respect and interest Hagerty pays to working to understand things unknown to and outside the boundaries of consideration of much of western study, like that of Maya cosmovision, shows there dedication to both her work and the people she has come to care for - both living and dead.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Confinement, Death, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Sexual assault, Suicide, Torture, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Police brutality, Grief, Religious bigotry, Death of parent, Murder, Colonisation, War, and Injury/Injury detail