#alexa hagerty

[anthrofreshtodeath]

Are fans of Bones reading this? I am - I’m not done yet but this book… oh, this book. If you enjoyed Bones for Dr. Brennan and the work of anthropology and you want a serious, adult look into it, read this. It’s almost an insult to this book to associate it with a crime drama, but the discussion of how forensic anthropology changes you, how genocide changes an entire population, is so poignant. The best chapter by far is chapter seven, which provides a deep dive into the linguistics of genocide. Please, please read this.

[bangbangwhoa]

books I’ve read in 2024 📖 no. 126

Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains by Alexa Hagerty

“It is one story among many. Every bone tells a life. Every person lost is a world.”

[deciduousangel]

Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration — of building something new with the “pile of broken mirrors” that is memory, loss, and mourning.

Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains by Alexa Hagerty

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in July:

1). Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years (Heidi Julavits)

2). Bluets (Maggie Nelson)

3). Essays in Love: A Novel (Alain de Botton)

4). The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Maggie Nelson)

5). Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Alexa Hagerty)

6). Margot (Wendell Steavenson)

7). An Alphabet for Gourmets (M.F.K. Fisher)

8). My Documents (Alejandro Zambra)

9). Planet of Clay (Samar Yazbek)

10). The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays (Kelly McMasters)

11). Offshore (Penelope Fitzgerald)

12). Encounter (Milan Kundera)

13). Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)

14). Gingerbread (Helen Oyeyemi)

15). A Small Place (Jamaica Kincaid)

16). Where I Was From (Joan Didion)

[kaijukiki]

I happened upon this book much the way anyone would happen upon a body in the woods, a finger in the dirt, or fragment left where it lie shorn cut at the ankle or wrist…it surprised me. But for Alexa Hagerty, forensic anthropologist finding such evidence of “La violencia” was every bit intentional. And integral to the mystery and the justice of a people who’s story is brought to light, by hands in dirt. Shovels, spades, and toothbrushes. Following a carefully and responsibly constructed narrative that details the process of work that puts people together, but also shreds them to the core. Part linguistic a anthropological triumph and scientific data of accounts, Hagerty writes like a poet in the dirt but also a scientist in a field lab. Truly one of the most uncommon and moving #nonfictionNovember reads I couldn’t put down.

[steddie-island]

No one asked for this but 🤷🏼‍♀️

Finished

The Haunting of Alejandra - V. Castro 4/5 ⭐️

Electric Idol - Katee Robert 3.5/5 ⭐️

Learn My Lesson - Katee Robert 5/5 ⭐️

A Worthy Opponent - Katee Robert 4/5 ⭐️

Death Between the Pages - Peggy Jaeger 3.5/5 ⭐️

The Hellbound Heart - Clive Barker 3/5⭐️

My Darling Dreadful Thing - Johanna van Veen 5/5⭐️ (God I wish I could read this for the first time again 😭😭)

Requiem for a Memory - Saige Denmark 2.5/5⭐️

Hunt on Dark Waters - Katee Robert 3/5⭐️

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson 4/5⭐️ (Highly highly recommend audiobook over the physical or ebook.)

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke - Eric LaRocca 2.75/5 ⭐️ (My rating of this keeps fluctuating. We’ll see how I’m feeling in a day or two, it might go up to 3 again. 😂)

Currently reading

Camp Damascus - Chuck Tingle

Still Life With Bones - Alexa Hagerty

A Haunting on the Hill - Elizabeth Hand

Flight of Icarus - Caitlin Schneiderhan (I know feelings were very mixed on this but I know I’m going to love it, it’s more of my boy and that’s not a bad thing. Elliott suggested it as a palette cleanser so we’re going for it!)

Upcoming TBR (Can and will change depending on what my ADHD finds interesting at the time.)

Whalefall - Daniel Kraus

From The Belly - Emmett Nahil

Manhunt - Grace Felker-Martin

Home is Where the Bodies Are - Jenna Rose

Incidents Around the House - Josh Mallerman

DNFs of the year

Never Whistle at Night - A dark fiction anthology

I wanted to love this but I just. Didn’t. And it’s what made me realize I don’t vibe with short stories. I felt the same way about Out There Screaming last year. Some of the stories that I managed to get through were really interesting and others I just hated the author’s style and had to go back and re-read chunks (very annoying in short stories which feel like they’re supposed to be easier?) IDK, I just. Didn’t fall in love with it. I might try this one and Out There Screaming later but for now she's a DNF.

The God of the Woods - Liz Moore

I’m not DNF’ing this one for good I don’t think, it was just not the campy slasher read I for some reason thought it would be and it was like. Rich people being assholes to each other a little bit?? Idk it wasn’t BAD, this was just not the time to read it for me. I AM planning on picking it up again. Eventually. Down the road. Ish.

[laurelhare]

still life with bones, alexa hagerty (2023)

[rockislandadultreads]

Libby Spotlight: True Crime eBooks

Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty

Throughout Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, state forces killed more than two hundred thousand people. Argentina’s military dictatorship disappeared up to thirty thousand people. In the wake of genocidal violence, families of the missing searched for the truth. Young scientists joined their fight against impunity. Gathering evidence in the face of intimidation and death threats, they pioneered the field of forensic exhumation for human rights. 

In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost.  Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.

Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

The Science of Murder by Carla Valentine

Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, and nearly every story she ever wrote involves one—or, more commonly, several—dead bodies. And the cause of death, the motives behind violent crimes, the clues that inevitably are left behind, and the people who put the pieces together to solve the mystery invite the reader to analyze the evidence and race to find the answer before the detective does. Nearly every step of the way, Christie outlines the nuts and bolts of early 20th-century crime detection, relying on physical evidence to tell the real story behind the facades humans erect to escape detection.

Christie wouldn't have talked of "forensics" as it is understood today—most of her work predates the modern developments of forensics science—but in each tale she harnesses the power of human observation, ingenuity, and scientific developments of the era. A fascinating, science-based deep dive, The Science of Murder examines the use of fingerprints, firearms, handwriting, blood spatter analysis, toxicology, and more in Christie's beloved works.

Lost in the Valley of Death by Harley Rustad

For centuries, India has enthralled westerners looking for an exotic getaway, a brief immersion in yoga and meditation, or in rare cases, a true pilgrimage to find spiritual revelation. Justin Alexander Shetler, an inveterate traveler trained in wilderness survival, was one such seeker.

In his early thirties Justin Alexander Shetler, quit his job at a tech startup and set out on a global journey: across the United States by motorcycle, then down to South America, and on to the Philippines, Thailand, and Nepal, in search of authentic experiences and meaningful encounters, while also documenting his travels on Instagram. His enigmatic character and magnetic personality gained him a devoted following who lived vicariously through his adventures. But the ever restless explorer was driven to pursue ever greater challenges, and greater risks, in what had become a personal quest—his own hero's journey.

In 2016, he made his way to the Parvati Valley, a remote and rugged corner of the Indian Himalayas steeped in mystical tradition yet shrouded in darkness and danger. There, he spent weeks studying under the guidance of a sadhu, an Indian holy man, living and meditating in a cave. At the end of August, accompanied by the sadhu, he set off on a "spiritual journey" to a holy lake—a journey from which he would never return.

Lost in the Valley of Death is about one man's search to find himself, in a country where for many westerners the path to spiritual enlightenment can prove fraught, even treacherous. But it is also a story about all of us and the ways, sometimes extreme, we seek fulfillment in life.

She Kills Me by Jennifer Wright

In every tragic story, men are expected to be the killers. There are countless studies and works of art made about male violence. However, when women are featured in stories about murder, they are rarely portrayed as predators. They're the prey. This common dynamic is one of the reasons that women are so enthralled by female murderers. They do the things that women aren't supposed to do and live the lives that women aren't supposed to want: lives that are impulsive and angry and messy and inconvenient. Maybe we feel bad about loving them, but we eat it up just the same. Residing squarely in the middle of a Venn diagram of feminism and true crime, She Kills Me tells the story of 40 women who murdered out of necessity, fear, revenge, and even for pleasure.

[thistle-and-thorn]

What's your favorite nonfiction book?

AHHHHH I read a lot a lot a lot of non-fiction (about equal with fiction I would say) so I am going to bombard you with recs, I am truly sorry, but non-fiction is a passion of mine so I broke it into the three main categories that I read:

To learn about a topic: Say Nothing (about the history of the IRA) & Empire of Pain (about the opioid crisis) by Patrick Radden Keefe. PRK is an excellent, excellent writer. These go super fast, he writes with an enormous amount of pathos, and I really, really enjoyed both of these. (I loved Say Nothing, but my recommendation comes with the caveat that I have problems with the end.) Under the Banner of Heaven (about polygamy and Mormon extremism) by Jon Krakauer is also great. I love how he uses the case to build a history of Mormonism but also questions religious extremism more broadly.

Memoirs I love include: City of Falling Angels by Jon Berendt. Another one I have read again and again. People think it's rambling and meandering but I find it charming. Ducks by Kate Beaton is a graphic novel about working in the Canadian oil fields and is really well-done. The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre has stuck with me more than I anticipated as well. One that I just finished this weekend and already want to re-read is Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty about her experience excavating mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina. It's a beautiful meditation on science, death, power, and memory. The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power is a non-traditional political memoir which gives insight into the philosophy behind Obama-era foreign policy but also...what it's like to be a woman in power?

3. I read a lot of literary criticism as well: Sex with Shakespeare by Jillian Keenan is a flawed, but compelling memoir/Shakespeare essay about how she came to terms with her sexuality and kinks through Shakespeare. On Stories by C.S. Lewis is a compilation of essays and notes on...well, stories.

Okay. that's like. 12 instead of one. i will cut myself off! But I cannot choose!!

thank you T-T

[cozcat]

are you a big reader? have you read anything good lately?

I FORGOT I DIDN'T RESPOND TO THIS but yeah i guess you could say i'm a big reader at [checks storygraph] 93 books this year. so I'll give you five highlights from recently.

I finished the Deverry series by Katharine Kerr, and although I wasn't overwhelmed by the ending, I wasn't expecting to be - I did, however, still enjoy it, and it's a series I'd recommend if you want a sprawling and complex high fantasy involving reincarnation across the centuries. (that being said: it's pretty committed to very Traditional Gender Roles as it's based on a Dark Ages-equivalent society. so go in knowing that.)

Gwen & Art Are Not In Love by Lex Croucher is a very fun medieval YA about two royals, betrothed since birth, who hate each other's guts, but enter an uneasy alliance when they each find out the other is queer.

the Nevermoor series by Jessica Townsend is middle grade fantasy about a neglected and lonely child who is suddenly whisked away on the eve of what should be the day of her death to compete for a place in a magical society in a place called Nevermoor and it is so fun. I read it wanting a recommendable replacement for a certain other series that has a similar sounding premise but this is so good, very much stands on its own (you kinda have to twist your words to make it sound as similar as I did and the resemblance does fall away pretty quickly). also it's nice to read about normalised queer characters in a series for kids.

Still Life With Bones by Alexa Hagerty is a fascinating autobiography about her work in Guatemala and Argentina, excavating mass graves from the wars there. Hagerty is not a forensic anthropologist but rather a (I believe) social anthropologist, so a lot of the book is talking to the living, not merely about the dead.

and Small Island by Andrea Levy, quite frankly, blew me away. this is about Jamaican immigrants to the UK after World War Two, and their experiences during and after the war, as well as those of the white woman who takes them in as lodgers. beautifully written, deeply emotional, it ripped my heart out. honestly, I don't have the words for how much I loved this. (and although I watched it a few years ago, I'd say now, having read the book, that it is an excellent adaptation.)

yeah there's been some bangers this year

[pneumaticpresence]

The [ghosts’] visitation was most comparable to a dream. While it unfolded, I was immersed in it. When it was over, it vanished. It was not real or imaginary; it seemly belonged to another category of existence, as waking and sleeping are different states of being. It was like the optical illusion in which you look one way and see a vase and look another and see a woman’s profile, but you can never see both at once. Look this way, and the ghosts are real. Look this way, and you have some sort of PTSD.

Optical illusions like the “Rubin vase” invoke a phenomenon called “multistable perception.” Struggling to make sense of ambiguous information, our visual systems decide an image one way, then another, in what are known as “perceptual reversals.” We are wired to make sense of things, and when things are too uncertain and complex to interpret, we oscillate between possible explanations, unable to settle on one.

Catastrophic violence overwhelms sense-making. How can people inflict such suffering on one another? How much grief is in a mass grave? Atrocity invokes a form of multistable perception; unable to assimilate the magnitude or horror, the mind reels between different systems of meaning. The ritual and the analytical buzz in electrical proximity. Science and ghosts, blue on red, snap in and out of focus. There is no stable place to land when confronting the world’s violence.

Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones (2023)

[txttle]

Reading Still Life With Bones by Alexa Hagerty and struck by this quote:

“Like Guatemalan dictators before and after him, Ríos Montt targeted rural Maya communities for their perceived support of guerilla groups, proclaiming his aim to ‘drain the waters where the fish swim.’” Page 49.

It reminds me of the discussion of the partisan, Jewish, Bolshevik math that Waitman Wade Beorn describes in his book, Marching Into Darkness. Basically, the idea that the Weirmarcht justified the genocide in Belarus by conflating all Jews with partisans, all partisans with Bolsheviks, all partisans with Jews, all Jews with Bolsheviks, all Bolsheviks with Jews… and all possible permutations of that. For those who hated Bolsheviks, they could justify their atrocities that way, for those who hated Jews, the same. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true.

That isn’t to compare the situations of the victims at all, just the mentality of perpetrators. All genocides are unique, and all genocides are the same.

[thehumanistvampire]

Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

by Alexa Hagerty

[pdougmc]

#facism #ChristianNationalism #RonDeSantis, #racism, #antisemitism I just started listening to a new book:  Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains by Alexa Hagerty. So far, it has covered the massacres in Guatemala and Argentina.   You may be old enough to remember 1976, the beginning of the Argentine military dictatorship.  One of their principal activities: book banning.  They also had the following qualities, Anti-feminism and opposition to anyone who dares to be different from them.  A word to the wise.

[dyke-terra]

I think it’s also worth pointing out the difference between a long running campaign of enforced disappearances and a massacre. Those Jews didn’t all die at once in a massacre. Not saying one is less bad, just that it’s a weird comparison to make.

I’ve got a copy of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, which is a memoir by a Jewish survivor of torture by the junta, waiting for me by my bed. Haven’t started it yet, so I can’t recommend it, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. It also comes up in Still Life With Bones by Alexa Hagerty, the memoir of a forensic archeologist, which I’m half way through and would recommend.

Hello, I'd like to ask a question in good faith about israel/Oct 7

I have seen many Jewish folk and israelis say that Oct 7 was the largest Massacre since the holocaust but from my understanding a significantly larger number of Jewish folk were killed and disappeared during the dirty war in Argentina in the 70s and 80s so I was just wondering I guess about why the dirty war doesn't seem as important as Oct 7 or why barely anyone talks about the dirty war because both events are horrific but I only ever see Oct 7 discussed when it comes to more modern Jewish oppression and history

this is a really interesting question, but I'd actually never heard of the dirty war in Argentina up until this point, so I don't I have the knowledge to answer you.

After some quick reading it seems it might be due to the fact that the dirty war seems to have occured over a long span of time, while October 7th was just one day, but that's just my conclusion after some very surface level research.

I'll tag some people who might be able to answer this better than I can.

@historicity-was-already-taken @homochadensistm @native-n-jewish-thoughts @aqlstar @gay-jewish-bucky @newnitz @spale-vosver @magnetothemagnificent

[steddie-island]

Tomorrow is our B&N trip and I'm so fucking stoked. I keep going over the list of shit I want to look for, even if I don't end up grabbing it all. 😂

So far we have:

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor

An Education in Malice by ST Gibson

Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty

Leather & Lark by Brynne Weaver (Have I read the first one? No but I know I'm gonna love it. 😂)

Also I want to just look at T Kingfisher because I feel like I would enjoy her stuff

I may or may not end up getting any of these, but we'll see!