“One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps” traces how states have used concentration camps from the late 19th century to the present and argues that this system is not an aberration limited to Nazi Germany but a recurring tool of modern governance worldwide.hachettebookgroup+2
Pitzer’s central claim is that concentration camps form a continuous global system that has existed for more than a century, emerging when governments decide to remove certain people from the protection of law under the guise of security, war, or social order. She shows recurring patterns: crises produce scapegoats, rights are suspended, camps are justified as temporary or protective, then slide into dehumanization, mass death, and often become normalized or forgotten afterward.kirkusreviews+3
The book opens with Spain’s “reconcentración” in 1890s Cuba, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were herded into camps and decimated by hunger and disease.startribune+1
Pitzer then tracks colonial and wartime camps in places like the Philippines, South Africa, and World War I internment sites, arguing these “experiments” created a template later used on “enemy aliens” and internal suspects.goodreads+2
She devotes major sections to the Soviet gulag and Nazi Konzentrationslager, detailing how administrative detention, forced labor, and bureaucratized cruelty evolved into systems of extermination.revista.drclas.harvard+2
The narrative extends to postwar examples in Asia, Latin America, and the United States, including Japanese American internment and Guantánamo, which she labels a contemporary instance of indefinite detention without trial.kirkusreviews+2
Throughout, she interweaves survivor testimonies and guards’ accounts to highlight the daily textures of camp life alongside the structural logic that makes camps possible.hachettebookgroup+2
Global, synthetic scope: Pitzer links camps across six continents and multiple regimes, dispelling the assumption that concentration camps are solely a Nazi innovation and instead situating them as a recurrent feature of modern states.startribune+3
Moral and analytical clarity: She identifies a process—crisis, scapegoating, suspension of due process, then camp internment—that recurs across cases, giving readers a framework to recognize when societies are drifting toward camp logics.mcr.scholasticahq+2
Use of testimony and archival work: Drawing on archives, interviews, and survivor narratives, she balances structural history with intimate stories, which reviewers note makes the book both intellectually coherent and emotionally powerful.revista.drclas.harvard+3
Contemporary relevance: By connecting early camps to Guantánamo and other present-day sites, she insists that “it can happen everywhere,” turning the book into a warning about current and future policies rather than a closed chapter of the past.kirkusreviews+2
Breadth over depth: Some reviewers argue that the global reach forces compression, leaving key episodes (such as the Balkans in the 1990s or Middle Eastern conflicts) treated briefly or omitted altogether.startribune
Contested categorizations: Her decision to include World War I enemy-alien internment and certain modern facilities under the “concentration camp” label strikes some critics as overstretching the concept and flattening important distinctions between types and severities of camps.kirkusreviews+1
Uneven coverage: The most detailed and compelling chapters focus on the Soviet gulag and Nazi system, while other regions and episodes can feel like illustrations rather than fully worked-out case studies.revista.drclas.harvard+2
Normative stance may trouble some historians: Because Pitzer writes with explicit moral urgency and draws sharp analogies to present-day sites, readers seeking a more detached or narrowly empirical account might find the argument too normative or politically pointed.startribune+1
If you’d like, I can break down her “process” model of how societies slide into building camps and map it against a specific case you’re working on.