In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist, left the safe confines of a lab in Berkeley, California, to serve as one of sixteen scientists chosen by the United Nations to unearth the physical evidence of the Rwandan genocide. Over the next four years, Koff's grueling investigations took her across geography synonymous with some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. "
The Bone Woman is Koff's unflinching, riveting account of her seven UN missions to Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Rwanda, as she shares what she saw, how it affected her, who was prosecuted based on evidence she found, and what she learned about the world. Yet even as she recounts the hellish nature of her work and the heartbreak of the survivors, she imbues her story with purpose, humanity, and a sense of justice. A tale of science in service of human rights, "The Bone Woman is, even more profoundly, a story of hope and enduring moral principles.

Reviews

In 1996, at age 23, Koff went from graduate school in forensic anthropology to forensic investigative work in Kibuye, Rwanda, as part of a team sent by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) following the genocide. She participated in six other missions, recovering bodies following mass murders in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. This is a first-person account of her experiences. When the women of Vukovar, Croatia, resisted having bodies exhumed because they wanted to find their relatives alive, the author was forced to question the true value of her work. But she realized that the evidence revealed the commission of a terrible crime against humanity and came to accept that forensic analysis would allow the victims to incriminate their killers and history to be written as accurately as possible. This is a brave book, presented in a clear voice by a scientist who is confident that her missions will get to the truth and yet human enough to cry at the horror of it all. For history, anthropology, and women's studies collections.-Joan W. Gartland, Detroit P.L. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

"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
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"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