A powerful meditation on life, death, and sorting out what can be saved of death in life.
An anthropologist recounts sifting through the remains left by horrific crimes in Guatemala and Argentina.
There have been numerous books on forensic anthropology in the last two decades, when DNA studies and other techniques have been refined for field and laboratory studies of crime. Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman, for instance, describes research in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other killing fields. Hagerty’s first book fits neatly in this tradition, distinguishing itself from other entries by its musings on the nature of political violence. The governor of Buenos Aires Province put it most graphically in the days of the military dictatorship: “First we will kill all of the subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those that remain indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid.” Fortunately, the regime collapsed before his vision could be realized; unfortunately, many thousands of Argentinian citizens died, and Hagerty has worked diligently to identify them. The bloodbath was even worse in Guatemala, where, “in a country of eight million people, there were 200,000 dead” after years of government massacres meant to suppress civil unrest. As Hagerty uncovers mass graves and crawls into burial pits and remote caves full of bones, she reflects on the nature of her work, particularly how difficult it is to isolate single victims in a jumble of remains. “The excavation is three-dimensional, sculptural, a Rubik’s Cube,” she writes. Things become more clinical and even less human while cutting away pieces of bone in order to study the DNA, a reliable means of connecting a body to a name—“and with a name, a body can be given a proper burial.” Hagerty is soulful but unsentimental, and she closes with just the right conundrum: With so much knowledge of horrific crimes, how can one return to “the manicured lawns and temperature-controlled archives of the university”?
A powerful meditation on life, death, and sorting out what can be saved of death in life.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593443132
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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