The Bone Woman, Clea Koff
The Bone Woman, Clea Koff
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The Bone Woman
A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo

Author: Clea Koff

Narrator: Clea Koff

Unabridged: 9 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/08/2023

Synopsis

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.

About Clea Koff

Clea Koff is a forensic anthropologist and author born in England and raised in Tanzania, Kenya, and the US. She was a member of the first international team brought together by the UN in 1996 to investigate evidence of war crimes, commencing in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. She also worked for the UN International Criminal Tribunal in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. The Bone Woman, her memoir, was published in 2004 and sold in translation to 13 countries. She holds a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and now writes fiction.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mike

I enjoyed this book, the concept and the facts were very interesting, it seemed like the author just did a lot of complaining about her situation. She spent so much time talking about her lack of equipment/feuds with co-workers that the original stated purpose of hers, bringing awareness to genocide......more

Goodreads review by Chrisiant

Koff occasionally gets a little too much of her own personal journey in the pages for my taste, but at other points I find her personal reflections particularly relevant. Mostly when she overshares and gets off on personal meditations, I'm willing to forgive her because the rest of it is so interest......more

Goodreads review by Mandy

The Bone Woman is an incredibly well-written and poignant book written by the forensic anthropologist Clea Koff. The author talks about her work on mass graves in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo as part of UN International Criminal Tribunal investigations. It is hard to describe this book - I feel like I h......more

Goodreads review by Chris

Some intereesting passages, but mechanically written. The distance that Koff needed to maintain between her job (exhuming mass graves) and her interior self has been preserved in her writing.......more

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