i picked this up out of interest of the yugoslavian and rwandan genocides, but instead of just a historical account through autopsies, koff provided an insight into the work of a forensic anthropologist, and its importance in bringing justice to victims of crimes against humanity. koff delves into personal accounts of her time as a student in her mid-twenties working as part of a UN forensic team, exhuming and analysing the mass graves of rwanda, bosnia, croatia, and kosovo. she shares entries from her journal, letters to her parents, and details the processes of her work, such as how the stature of a body may be calculated through a femur measurement, or how the lack of a fusion in the collarbones suggests an age of under twenty-fibe. however, these accounts are not distant, technical, and clinical. koff includes descriptions of the relationships with her and her team -- the positive, such as dinner outside their guesthouse by lake kivu, and the negative, such as a disagreement over the age suggested by a body's teeth. she traces her thoughts through each interaction with a body, from the awareness of humanity from a rwandan woman's pink necklace or a yugoslavian boy's marbles, to the satisfaction of putting an identity to a body, of allowing, as she says, 'the bones to talk'. she describes her nightmares of limbs in her bed, and her trauma from an incident at lake kivu, and the frustration of her brief inability to keep her emotions compartmentalised away from her work. koff shows us that forensic work is more than simply analysing bodies -- it is about changing the trajectory of people's lives: her own, those of the families, and of those remaining in the wake of these tragedies, for whom history is rewritten with the answers that refused to be hidden.