Rating: 
Summary: Cool Book
Review: This was a quick really great read...I highly reccommend it!
Rating: 
Summary: A Smooth Narrative and a Southern Story-Telling Charm
Review: What is a forensic anthropologist? "We are physical anthropologists who are trained in the human skeleton, and we use that training in a medico-legal context to assist law enforcement." The real live "Bone Lady," Mary Manhein, answers this and another questions with smooth narrative and a Southerner's story-telling charm. A Louisiana State University graduate who didn't begin undergraduate studies until her early thirties, Manheim weaves her own autobiography into the short book's twenty-seven chapters. After completing the bachelor's degree in English, she earned a master's degree in anthropology from LSU. She grew up loving literature, she says. And her early years were anchored in rural home places, "the hills of southwest Arkansas and northwest Louisiana, where my life revolved around stories." Today, she is director of the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) at LSU. The Bone Lady tells dozens of work-related stories in and around her FACES Lab. Many detailed photographs and illustrations accompany the puzzle-like scenarios that the author finds herself trying to solve when either attempting to determine the identity of human remains, or the cause of death. Filled with bits of trivia, the story takes readers into mysterious and sad cases of the "lost" people that Manhein has tried to identify, from drown victims to a suicide stowed away under a family porch. Even the controversial case of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long's assassination receives a chapter-length treatment, at least Dr. Carl Austin Weiss's alleged participation in the shooting on September 8, 1935. Readers of true crime, memoir, and Louisiana history will find this slim volume interesting, strong, and crisp. These are the hard-won stories that have made the author; all of it is rooted in the red clay and swamps of Louisiana. ----------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman
Rating:
Summary: A Smooth Narrative and a Southern Story-Telling Charm
Review: What is a forensic anthropologist? "We are physical anthropologists who are trained in the human skeleton, and we use that training in a medico-legal context to assist law enforcement." The real live "Bone Lady," Mary Manhein, answers this and another questions with smooth narrative and a Southerner's story-telling charm. A Louisiana State University graduate who didn't begin undergraduate studies until her early thirties, Manheim weaves her own autobiography into the short book's twenty-seven chapters. After completing the bachelor's degree in English, she earned a master's degree in anthropology from LSU. She grew up loving literature, she says. And her early years were anchored in rural home places, "the hills of southwest Arkansas and northwest Louisiana, where my life revolved around stories." Today, she is director of the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) at LSU. The Bone Lady tells dozens of work-related stories in and around her FACES Lab. Many detailed photographs and illustrations accompany the puzzle-like scenarios that the author finds herself trying to solve when either attempting to determine the identity of human remains, or the cause of death. Filled with bits of trivia, the story takes readers into mysterious and sad cases of the "lost" people that Manhein has tried to identify, from drown victims to a suicide stowed away under a family porch. Even the controversial case of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long's assassination receives a chapter-length treatment, at least Dr. Carl Austin Weiss's alleged participation in the shooting on September 8, 1935. Readers of true crime, memoir, and Louisiana history will find this slim volume interesting, strong, and crisp. These are the hard-won stories that have made the author; all of it is rooted in the red clay and swamps of Louisiana. ----------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman
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