This is an engrossing and important book. Journalist Andrea Pitzer has written a story of concentration camps from their origins at the very end of the 19th century through the beginnings of the 21st. Only the Nazis had technological death factories bent on genocide, but extrajudicial mass detention of civilians in the modern sense started in Cuba shortly before the Spanish-American war and was indeed one of the justifications for it -- the sinking of the Maine was the spark but the horrors of the camps for "reconcentración" provided much of the moral force. And yet, though we ostensibly opposed the camps, the idea was so useful that we had our own camps in the Philippines before you could blink.

Pitzer traces the idea and the institution from its origins through colonialist wars in Africa, enemy alien camps in the two world wars, the horrors of the Nazi camps, America's Japanese internment camps, the gulags, Asian communist reeducation camps, repression of African freedom movements, anticommunist repression in South America, and finally Guantánamo and the other camps of the US "war on terror". She catalogs the gradations and varieties -- simple detention, starvation, disease, torture, labor camps, and extermination camps. Each chapter covers another place, time, and stage in the development of camps. In most chapters, she weaves information from the experiences of one or a few individual camp survivors with the larger sweep of historical information. Some of the events she covers I knew about in detail -- there was relatively little new to me in the chapter on the Nazi camps -- but others I knew only as phrases (the Mau Mau rebellion, for instance), or not at all. It's all riveting and important and the news sounds very different to me now that I have read it.

Highly recommended. ( )

Chimneys do not a concentration camp make. ( )