The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "IT TOOK TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO FLY FROM CALIFORNIA TO Rwanda..." (more)
Key Phrases: autopsy tent, morgue team, autopsy technicians, Jose Pablo, Clothing Day, Nova Kasaba (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

An unusual combination of character traits led 31-year-old Clea Koff to her profession. She is hard-working, physically strong and emotionally resilient; she has a capacity for stoicism, a desire for justice, and the ability to respond with equanimity to the sight and smell of maggot-ridden, decomposing flesh. As a child, Koff buried dead birds in plastic bags in her yard so that she could dig them up later and examine their state of decay. By age 23, she was an anthropologist serving in Rwanda on the first forensic team ever dispatched to assemble evidence of war crimes. There, she and her colleagues extracted some 500 bodies from the largest mass grave ever exhumed. For Koff, it was only the beginning. She would serve on six more missions in Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

What drives a person to devote her life to studying the dead? How can such work come to feel normal -- even exhilarating -- rather than soul-crushing, tragic or horrifying? Such questions stalk Koff throughout The Bone Woman, a memoir of her work on mass graves for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. She says she is driven in large part by idealism. "I find it inordinately satisfying to lift bodies I've excavated out of the grave," she writes. "These are people whom someone attempted to expunge from the record, the very bodies perpetrators sought to hide." When a reporter asks Koff what she's thinking as she probes the earth to determine the dimensions of a mass grave, Koff replies, "I'm thinking, 'We're coming. We're coming to take you out.' " (Koff's colleagues teased her mercilessly for the earnestness of this remark. Her boss liked to say that Koff was thinking, "We're coming . . . we're coming to take you out to dinner.") Confronted with a prodigious pile of corpses, Koff does not feel helpless: She feels constructively engaged. Indeed, Koff sees herself bound to the victims and survivors of genocide by "silvery threads"; to surviving relatives, she hopes to offer closure, in the form of a body for burial and an explanation of how and where a loved one died. To the dead, Koff imagines she offers release from the anonymity of mass burial and a sort of justice in the form of incontrovertible evidence that they were civilians killed in cold blood.

Indeed, the forensic evidence Koff's team unearthed helped lead to numerous convictions at the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Some Rwandan skeletons exhibited severed Achilles tendons that prevented victims from fleeing as they were slaughtered by blunt trauma to the skull. Yugoslavs had their hands wired behind their backs and their bodies riddled with bullets. In a mass grave in Ovcara, Croatia, Koff exhumed the bodies of hospital patients -- one with a set of X-rays hidden in his pajamas, as though he might need them where he was going.

Nonetheless, the motivating sense of righteous mission can be a brittle thing in the face of so much death; and the truth Koff finds within the graves is a miserable truth of limited comfort to the living. In Rwanda, a woman asked to see what she believed to be her uncle's remains. Koff set a skull atop a body bag. It was all she had to show the woman, and it was simply grotesque; the woman burst into tears at a distance and could not even bring herself to approach. In Vukovar, the wives and mothers of the dead resented the forensic team's mission to prove that their relatives had been mowed down by Serb fighters. They would have preferred to nurture the hope that their men were still alive, as prisoners of war.

There were moments when Koff herself broke down -- while handling the bullet-ridden bones of a very young man in Srebrenica, for instance. In Rwanda she had nightmares that she shared her bed with a tangle of legs. In Croatia she found one man's body sunk vertically in a mass grave; it gave rise to a recurring dream in which his head was lodged in a table that she scrubbed, tugging his hair with the back and forth motion. But in general, when the human tragedy of it all intruded on her ability to exhume, clean, reconstruct, age and sex the bones, she pushed it firmly away. The emotional self-mastery required by her work was perhaps the greatest challenge for Koff, and she met it not with steeliness but with buoyancy of spirit. If at the start of The Bone Woman, Koff's fascination with bones and decomposition strikes the reader as macabre, by the end it's hard not to appreciate that something like a love of humanity, as well as simple acceptance of the mortality of our flesh, lies at its core.

As a memoir, however, The Bone Woman is less than fully realized. Koff's self-knowledge comes in flickers, rather than driving her narrative. Her emotional responses to the work careen from repression to unfettered sorrow to an almost sentimentalized idealism. She veers off for whole chapters on what amounts to office politics: her irritation with her boss's macho attitude, the day the head pathologist yelled at her in front of a journalist. At times like these, Koff seems to be narrating an ordinary tale of a young woman's first work experiences, rather than the truly extraordinary story that's hers alone to tell. 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. Fortunately, that alone is enough to make this book surprising, compelling and worth reading.

Reviewed by Laura Secor

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist

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 Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (April 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400060648
• ISBN-13: 978-1400060641
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #939,325 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars all comes together in the end, May 27, 2004

By	Paul Box (Logan, Utah, United States) - See all my reviews

The book seems to read as a journal that was written up into a book. The majority of the book follows the author's thoughts and observations over a few significant years in her life, in pretty much chronological order. To a reader who's not paying attention, the whole thing might seem like an "I was there" account. However, one gets insight into how the author approaches her work, with careful observation, dispassionate analysis, and contemplation of the pieces to solve a larger puzzle. She also convincingly communicates an underlying enthusiasm and idealism that drew her into the work and maintained interest throughout. The narrative contains many anectodes about kinds of information that bones can reveal, and does a good job of communicating nightmarish conditions in a mass grave and speculation about the atrocities that created them, but concentrating on the interesting problems to be solved rather than going into gratuitous "gross-out" descriptions of the conditions or the violence. (They seem to have left her with a few nightmares, but whether she was having nightmares was never the point of the narrative.)

The writing style is good throughout the book, but the last chapter, which I expected to be some editorial "wrap-up" of the book, turned out to be a real thought-provoker. It's extremely bad form for a reviewer to discuss the ending of a book, and my overpromoting it may lead to dissapointment in some. However, she describes some bigger picture issues and generalities, conclusions about the world that comes from the commonalities of the various cases she worked on. Coming at the end of the book, you can see her conclusions arising out of the same piecing together and contemplation of results for society and political systems that she applied to individual corpses and grave sites. I suspect that these realizations may be one of the primary motivators for her writing the book; it's where the long string of anecdotes becomes a discussion of the world at large. I would like to have seen more of this discussion, but that may be for a later book. I simply trying to say here that it's worthwhile to finish the book.

I may be overly generous giving the book five stars, as it's not the "perfect" book, but I think it should be required reading in some circles. It's certainly one to hold your attention on an extended flight.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Window Into Grisly Work, January 11, 2005

By	Melissa Martin "-MM" (Winnipeg, MB Canada) - See all my reviews

Honestly, I am somewhat surprised by the tone and number of negative reviews of this book. While no reviewer would pretend that the Bone Woman is any work of great storytelling, I nonetheless found it to be an intriguing look into a world that I myself can scarcely imagine: that of forensic anthropology.

One regular criticism of the book seems to be that Koff expresses no moments of emotion in the field, whereas she experiences major frustration over certain perceived iniquities in the organization of the excavations. I believe that Koff herself more than addresses this seeming dichotomy when she stresses, early on in the book, her love of her work and her ability to find some measure of peculiar tranquility in excavating the graves, a sense of being party to an act of absolute justice.

Given that approach, I don't think that her apparent lack of emotional trauma in the field is so hard to understand, and her frustrations with the bureaucratic nature of field operations is also in sync with other memoirs written by various NGO or UN workers. I would also suspect that often, professional detachment in the field creates stress that is released via frustrations with intra-staff relations outside of it. Koff was a woman who wished to be completely engaged by her work: the reality of disturbances to that immersion naturally emerge in the text.

With that said, the book itself is no classic; it lacks a sense of greater purpose, or a concept of her work's place in the greater whole. It is field-focused and neither particularly revelatory or particularly insightful.

However, to those interested in humanitarian efforts and in world events, it is an accessible and interesting look into the grisly and yet absolutely necessary work of documenting war crimes' dead.

Take the Bone Woman for what it is: a rare opportunity to get a hands-on feel of what is for most of us and almost unimaginable profession. As an opportunity to see a window into that world, it has value indeed.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Shallow, Not Unlike the Graves, October 5, 2004

By	Tortious Interference "Zorkahn" (Chicago) - See all my reviews

Arrogance does not begin to describe the author's perspective toward those with whom she interacts throughout her little adventure. Her insecurity is clearly derived from an inferiority complex - or god forbid a superiority complex - gone awry while working side-by-side with world-renowned experts in the human rights field. As evidenced in her tales, she does not take criticism well, and always blames personality flaws in others while devoid of any self-critique. Her negative portrayal of those she worked with is often shallow, and demonstrates that she learned little to nothing ABOUT her colleagues, while ironically failing to appreciate all that she did learn FROM them. Sorry you had to share a tent, but grow up, Clea; the real story is NOT about you. Your pettiness is a disservice to the victims who, throughout your book, remained buried under that chip on your shoulder.