“Cruel Attachments is wholly absorbing, in the sense that it is un-put-down-able, but also in the sense that it provides numerous occasions for what can feel like utterly contaminating, destabilizing emotional identifications: with victims, family members, therapists, prison guards, the anthropologist himself—and, however unnervingly, also perpetrators. It is no small feat to bring readers inside the emotional worlds of all these players. To have done so, and with such subtlety and nuance, is remarkable and unprecedented.”
— Dagmar Herzog, Graduate Center, City University of New York
“An unflinching and unsettling look at the limits of empathy, Borneman’s important ethnography carefully traces the complex pathways of desire, attachment, harm, violation, and care made visible in the context of rehabilitation.”
— C. Jason Throop, University of California, Los Angeles