Published ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, The Bone Woman is a riveting, deeply personal account by a
forensic anthropologist sent on seven missions by the UN War Crimes Tribunal.
To prosecute charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, the UN needs proof that the bodies found are those
of non-combatants. This means answering two questions: who the victims were, and how they were killed. The only
people who can answer both these questions are forensic anthropologists.
Before being sent to Rwanda in 1996, Clea Koff was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric
skeletons in the safe confines of Berkeley, California. Over the next four years, her gruelling investigation into
events that shocked the world transformed her from a wide-eyed student into a soul-weary veteran -- and a wise
and deeply thoughtful woman. Her unflinching account of those years -- what she saw, how it affected her, who went
to trial based on evidence she collected -- makes for an unforgettable read, alternately riveting, frightening
and miraculously hopeful. Readers join Koff as she comes face to face with the human meaning of genocide: exhuming
almost five hundred bodies from a single grave in Kibuye, Rwanda; uncovering the wire-bound wrists of Srebrenica
massacre victims in Bosnia; disinterring the body of a young man in southwestern Kosovo as his grandfather looks
on in silence. As she recounts the fascinating details of her work, the hellish working conditions, the bureaucracy
of the UN, and the heartbreak of survivors, Koff imbues her story with an immense sense of hope, humanity and justice.