Reviews tagging 'Police brutality'

Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty

15 reviews

librarymouse's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.5

Prior to reading this book, I had no idea that the American-backed genocide of Mayans in Guatemala, nor the Nazi-affiliated disappearings in Argentina ever happened. In this book, Alexa Hagerty does a beautiful and poignant job exploring the atrocities and her experience exhuming the mass graves left in their wake at a human level. She breaks down the walls built up in many western minds between the body and the person they were; the stories they still have left to tell, exploring how that mental block helps and hinders in archeological and anthropological study. The respect and interest Hagerty pays to working to understand things unknown to and outside the boundaries of consideration of much of western study, like that of Maya cosmovision, shows there dedication to both her work and the people she has come to care for - both living and dead.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Suicide, Torture, Forced institutionalization, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Colonisation, Death, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Child death, Death of parent, Murder, Police brutality, Religious bigotry, Sexual assault, Violence, and War

hannahmci's review against another edition

dark informative sad fast-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Death, Police brutality, Colonisation, and Child death

siria's review against another edition

challenging dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

A powerful and difficult look at the work involved in, and the meaning underpinning, the recovery of the remains of the Disappeared. Alexa Hegarty here recounts her work as a forensic anthropologist in Guatemala and Argentina, two countries marked by horrific dictatorial violence in the twentieth century. Individuals and sometimes whole communities were tortured and massacred, their remains dumped in mass graves or tossed down wells or dumped out at sea. When it's even possible to recover these remains—the sea tends to keep its secrets; some wells plumb too deep to be excavated safely—restoring their names to them is another very difficult task. Still Life with Bones is an absorbing and elegiac account of the terror that the state can inflict, and the choices that people make in the face of it; Hagerty's commitment to a grassroots, community-focused recovery process is admirable. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Violence, Torture, Child death, Murder, Police brutality, Genocide, Grief, and Kidnapping

moonytoast's review against another edition

challenging emotional medium-paced

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Kidnapping, War, Murder, Violence, Police brutality, Genocide, Gun violence, Grief, and Death

Moderate: Child death, Torture, and Sexual violence

laurenkimoto's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Gore, Classism, Hate crime, Kidnapping, Medical trauma, Racism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Miscarriage, Murder, Police brutality, Religious bigotry, Death of parent, Forced institutionalization, Genocide, Grief, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Rape, Violence, Physical abuse, War, Blood, Child death, Emotional abuse, Body horror, Confinement, Death, and Torture