-"Winter Favorite,” Librairie Mollat Bordeaux, 2021

-"The Book of the Month [April],” Sciences Humaines Magazin, 2021

“There is nothing natural about sleeping in one go . . . . In the past, people slept in two stages, separated by an hour or so of wakefulness. The historian Roger Ekirch, who made this astonishing discovery twenty years ago, has finally been translated into French. . . . This is one of the most astounding historical discoveries of the last twenty years. There was once a 'first sleep' and then we woke up, between midnight and two o'clock. Peasants would go to their animals, tend the fire; city dwellers would sometimes go out for a bite to eat in the street. One could also stay in bed and take advantage of this hour of wakefulness to pray or meditate, and often make love. One would go back to sleep for a ‘second sleep’, less restorative, but more conducive to dreams, until sunrise.The American Roger Ekirch is the original proponent of this thesis, which he first presented in 2001 in a resounding article. He is a very serious historian at Virginia Polytechnic University, specializing in the colonial history of North America. He was not translated into French until now. This injustice has just been repaired by Editions Amsterdam, which has published The Great Transformation of Sleep, a book containing two of his main articles. According to Ekirch, our 'biphasic' sleep has been erased from the collective memory. All that remains are our sleep disorders, a remnant of this past habitus, a distant trace of this segmented sleep. . . .’Consolidated' sleep, as practiced today, is therefore not at all natural: it is a simple social construction, and not necessarily the one that brings us the most well-being. Since Ekirch's discovery, historians and other social science researchers in the English-speaking world have been fascinated by sleep, to the point where we speak of sleep studies in the same way as gender studies or racial studies.”

-Pascal Riché, “Why sleep is (also) a social construct,” L’Obs (Paris)

"For a long time, humanity divided its nights into two stages; it is only with the industrial revolution, and the need to gain working time, that the norm is imposed of a continuous sleep - the awake phase becoming pathological insomnia. That sleep is a natural fact is difficult to contest: it is a biological mechanism essential to all animal life and the objective knowledge that we have of it depends essentially on the work of doctors and neurologists. This gives good reasons to think that our way of sleeping is identical to that of any other member of humanity, whatever the time and place in which we place it. However, in 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a surprising article questioning this proposition. . . . This discovery opened a field of research for the social sciences, whose task was to study sleep as a social practice that could vary from one era or society to another: Sleep Studies. "

-Benoît Peuch, "De l’éveil à l’insomnie," La Vie des Idées (Paris)

"As far back as I can remember, sleep has kept me awake at night. For me, sleep has always seemed threatening and dangerous to enter. It wasn't until I read a book [At Day's Close: Night in Times Past] about how restlessly my ancestors slept that I found a kind of peace with my own sleep anxiety. . . . After reading it and subsequently interviewing the author, I drove people around me crazy with my preaching. I am enriched by a working life in which I often read good books and talk to many interesting people, but I don't remember either before or since having such a deep urge to shout to the whole world: ‘STOP! LISTEN! YOU SHOULD HEAR SOMETHING YOU DON'T KNOW THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE.' "

-Anna Von Sperling, “For as Long as I Can Remember, Sleep Has Kept Me Awake at Night,” Dagbladet Information (Copenhagen)

“A social history of sleep was missing. . . . The fascinating discovery of Ekirch opens promising avenues for researchers. As well as for the bad sleepers. How can we not rejoice in insomnia that offers us the opportunity to reconnect with the fruitfulness of discussions, dreams and nocturnal embraces?”

-Marie Goudot, Études (Paris)

“R. Ekirch's essay, even though it was quite brief, did not go unnoticed, and many of his colleagues consider it as the first example of a history of human sleep considered as something other than a dead time satisfying a natural need . It inaugurated a research program that soon developed, and opened a debate with multiple entries: had segmented sleep really been the norm in the West, was it the product of a particular culture, the response to a certain environment, or was it present in all latitudes in pre-industrial societies? . . . Ekirch's thesis is at the origin of the development, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, of a body of historical and sociological work on sleep (sleep studies) where discussions are going well. . . We can only pay tribute to the original work of the historian who was the first to draw on the right thread.”

- Nicolas Journet, “The Book of the Month,“ SciencesHumaines Magazin (Paris)

"Humans have always slept. But they have not always done so in the same way. As the work of historian Roger Ekirch,whose book The Great Transformation of Sleep has just been translated into French, shows, monophasic sleeping, i.e. sleeping in one go, only became the norm at the time of the industrial revolution, with the arrival of electricity."

-Michael Balavoine, L'illustré (Lausanne)

“According to historian Roger Ekirch, the nights of our ancestors were divided into two phases, before the industrial revolution and artificial light imposed a new model of sleep: the night in one that we know today. His pioneering works are being translated these days into French. Insomniacs, rejoice: waking up in the middle of the night is more normal than it looks. . . . . Some books make you dizzy. Especially when they come to question what seemed obvious, at the very heart of our routine. The Great Sleep Transformation, by the American historian Roger Ekirch is one of them: by analyzing how our nights have evolved over the centuries, it shakes up what seemed so natural that we did not even think about it. . . . Our nights therefore have a story. But there is a secondary benefit to reading Roger Ekirch's work. The idea that our midnight awakenings and insomnia, so haunting and disturbing today, are ‘rather than a pathological form, the remnant of an older, once dominant human sleep structure.’”

-Sonya Faure, “Sleeping in one go: the story of a misconception,” Libération (Paris)

“Who has never envied the sleep of past centuries, which we can readily imagine as deep, restful, after a hard day of manual labor? This is a very romantic and frankly distorted vision, replies American historian Roger Ekirch. In reality, our ancestors were cold, their bodies folded up on a rough straw mattress, eaten away by fleas and dirt. All this while constantly fearing an unexpected burglary or suffering from multiple ailments, from pneumonia to rheumatism.But above all, contrary to the ideal of a full sleep, the sleepers of the past woke up in the middle of the night. In a thesis, published in the early 2000s and reproduced in the first part of the book, the historian rediscovers the "biphasic" sleep, that is to say, cut with a first and a second nap, which was in force before the industrial era.”

-Audrey Dufour, La Croix (Paris)

“Where are we with sleep? For so long that we have lost the memory of it, we have been told the same story of rules to follow and standards to respect in order to be able to sleep well. Yet nothing is less obvious than this account. In a series of publications which made a lot of noise in the United States in scholarly circles as well as among the general public, historian Roger Ekirch, best known for his work on the transatlantic slavery trade [sic], proved that what we think of as normal sleep is just a recent creation. As the texts gathered in The Great Sleep Transformation recall, it is possible to date this normalization of sleep from the time of the industrial revolution . . . . At a time when the question of sleep and insomnia recovers its political dimension, the brilliant demonstrations of Ekirch are to be considered - preferably, between two naps.”

-“La Grande Transformation du Sommeil : Essai,” Focus (Paris)

“First of all, a surprise: sleep historians and related studies and publications remain rare. In this context, the work of Roger Ekirch, a distinguished teacher at the Virginia Tech, Virginia, is often highlighted. In an article in the American Huffington Post, the author of the book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past , explains that before the industrial revolution, the night's sleep was actually split into two parts, with a waking period in between.”

-Fiona Moghaddam and Eric Chaverou, “Was the sleep of yesteryear really better before?”, “France Culture,” Radio France