Any title containing the words
mass graves portends some tough reading, and Koff's unblinking, direct memoir is not lacking in ghastliness. One of her aims, however, is to contrast her interior reactions to her work of exhuming and examining the victims of the Balkan and Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s with the meticulous professionalism needed to conduct it. Koff's observation that "when I analyze human remains I am interested, not repulsed" is shown in her objective descriptive writing about particular victims' physical characteristics and traumas. Away from the grave or autopsy table, however, Koff allows glimpses of the mental effort her professionalism requires by relating her numerous nightmares and manifestations of stress. She accepts this burden out of a deeply idealistic motivation--her hope that her career in forensic anthropology will reduce human rights violations in the world. Koff also writes about incidents of her field experiences such as privations, the dangers of gunfire and mines, and the interpersonal relations with her colleagues and UN guards.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
“The beauty and significance of Koff’s work and of her drive to do it come through most powerfully when she is crouching over a mass grave, untangling limbs, scraping dirt from a corpse’s clothes and finding, within what most of us would see as horror, something human that speaks. . . . Surprising, compelling, and worth reading.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“Only Koff herself can explain what happens in the heart when the living meet the dead. . . . [The Bone Woman relives] what a good many people cannot imagine ever enduring. . . . Koff’s seven ‘missions’ into fields of death erase all qualitative differences between horrors dreamed and horrors unearthed.”
–Los Angeles Times
Koff knows that bones talk, and she simply lets the bones she exhumes give testimony. . . . In descriptions free of sensationalism or sentimentality, [this] emotional distance gives
The Bone Woman its pared-down power.”
–MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR’s Fresh Air
“A highly personal account written in an engaging [style] . . . An accomplished writer . . . Koff speaks of her work with an irrepressible enthusiasm, and the kind of conviction that she believes she was born to do the job.”
–The New York Times
“Every detail — the marbles in a dead boy's pocket — seems to tell the same story, of human suffering on a scale nearly too awful to contemplate. But with each Body that Koff can prove belonged to a non-combatant, it becomes easier to successfully prosecute charges of war crimes. Her work is the place where science, idealism and humanism most intersect.”
—
The Independent on Sunday“Thomas Keneally wrote about the awkwardness of "good" as a literary subject. It is harder to make interesting than evil ... but sometimes he concluded, you find yourself staring at good in the face and just have to recognise it. So it is with
The Bone Woman.”
—
The Times (London)
“Her book — indeed, her life — is a testament to an idealism that shines through a grim, bloody reality.”
—
The Glasgow Herald
“Part science, part expose, part personal narrative,
The Bone Woman offers a rare insight into both the role of a forensic anthropologist, and the role of the UN tribunal's forensic team ... Yet, for all its forensic detail, it is Koff's deep sense of connection to the bodies she came to exhume, her unflinching sense of obligation to them, and her willingness to look at what they represent, that renders
The Bone Woman compelling reading.”
—
Sunday Times (Perth)
“It is a highly personal account written in an engaging I-was-there-style ... she gives a sense of the survivors and the guilt and grief they live with ... an accomplished writer ...”
—Jane Perlez,
The New York Times 'Saturday Profile'
