The Bone Woman: Among the Dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo

...working for the two United Nations International Criminal Tribunals as a forensic expert was a dream come true for me. I felt that most keenly my first day on the job in Rwanda: I was crouched on a 45-degree slope, under a heavy canopy of banana leaves and ripe avocados, placing red flags in the dark soil wherever I found human remains. Lets put it this way: I ran out of flags. At the age of twenty-three, Clea Koff joined Physicians for Human Rights as a forensic anthropologist. Working initially in Rwanda, after the genocide that tore the country apart in 1994, she exhumed mass graves seeking evidence that would help bring the perpetrators to justice and allow relatives to lay the dead to rest. Bone Woman is her unflinching account of what she saw and how it affected her. Over four years, her gruelling investigation into events that shocked the world transformed her from a wide-eyed student to a soul-weary veteran. Even as she recounts 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. BONE WOMAN is an unforgettable read, alternately rivetin