A review by barnstormingbooks
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo by Clea Koff

emotional informative fast-paced

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the ALC of the re-release of this book. 

The re-release of The Bone Woman is an interesting listen. Koff is a solid narrator of her story, and does an excellent job of both explaining, showing deference, but also a clear picture of what it was like to be a woman of African descent with relatives living in Africa to work with bodies in mass graves. 

Death, especially for Americans, is an interesting concept. Death as a source of entertainment (gladiators, action movies, plot drivers in dramas and almost every Disney movie…) seems to degrade the reality of death, especially mass death in a global context. Through sharing her experience Koff opens up those wounds. She discusses the science and processes involved, as well as the conditions of the camps the scientists stayed in, interactions with locals, the ever present threats of violence (mines or direct person to person) of working in an area that was recently a war zone, and the emotional toll this work takes. 

Koff’s work in Rwanda, Bosnia and Croatia and Kosovo, was a disturbing but necessary reminder of how closely these genocides occurred and how quickly we forget, which is its own type of violence. 

This is not an overly dramatic book, and Koff manages to tell her story in a way that makes her profession just that, a profession and a calling.