Convene Reads: Life Itself

One of the fascinating things about this industry is that it's seemingly impossible to find its boundaries; there's always another epic, high-profile conference that's gone on for years but that somehow you've never heard of. Such as the Conference on World Affairs, which is the subject of an entire chapter in Roger Ebert's warm, generous new memoir, Life Itself:

For sixty-six years, this annual meeting at the University of Colorado has persuaded a very mixed bag of people to travel to Boulder at their own expense, appear with one another on panels not of their choosing, lodge with local hosts who volunteer their spare rooms, speak spontaneously on topics they learn about only after they arrive, be driven around town by volunteers, be fed at lunch by the university and in the evening by such as the chairman, Jane Butcher, in her own home. For years the conference founder Howard Higman personally cooked roast beef on Tuesday night. The hundreds of panels, demonstrations, concerts, polemics, poetry readings, political discussions, and performances are and always have been free and open to the public.

This reminds me of two things: the cover story in our January 2011 issue, which was all about "big-tent, big-idea conferences"; and the One on One interview with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman in this month's issue, in which Wurman discusses the importance of operating outside your comfort zone, because "you don't get your best work when you pursue comfort." That seems to be the approach that the big-tent, big-idea Conference on World Affairs inflicts on its speakers, and it resonated strongly enough with Roger Ebert that he attended -- and spoke there -- for 40 years.

Convene Reads: In the Garden of Beasts

If you've ever thought that a diplomat's life involves anything besides meetings -- and conferences, receptions, cultural events, and tete-a-tetes -- In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson, is here to set you straight. In Larson's telling, William Dodd's time as U.S. ambassador to Germany -- during the beyond-crucial years of 1933 to 1937, when Hitler first came to power and then got busy consolidating it -- was nothing but face time. Ditto for his 24-year-old daughter, Martha, who cut a swath through Berlin's social scene, and was rumored to have had an affair with the head of the Gestapo. Throughout this engrossing, superbly detailed book, Larson uses meetings and other get-togethers to show how the politics of the day were playing out; it's fascinating to see the many different uses to which live events can be put, and how often what's happening publicly on stage can mask or diverge from what's actually playing out behind the scenes. Such as:

Dodd too was fast gaining an appreciation of the prickly sensitivities of the day. No event provided a better measure of these than a speech he gave before the Berlin branch of the American Chamber of Commerce on Columbus Day, October 12, 1933. His talk managed to stir a furor not only in Germany but also, as Dodd was dismayed to learn, within the State Department and among the many Americans who favored keeping the nation from entangling itself in European affairs. 

Convene Reads: Ghost in the Wires

Considering how Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker, by Kevin Mitnick, revolves around technology -- and the degree to which people like the author covet it for no other reason than the challenge of seeing what they can get away with -- it's no surprise that world-famous Consumer Electronics Show makes a cameo appearance here. But it's interesting nonetheless to get a hacker's perspective on CES from 20 years ago, and also to see the role that CES played in one of his scams:

Imagine a trade-show floor filled with 2 million square feet of space, packed with 200,000 people crammed wall to wall, sounding like they're all talking at once, mostly in Japanese, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. That's what the Las Vegas Convention Center was like in 1991 during CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show -- a candy store, drawing one of the biggest crowds in the world. 

Convene Reads: The Facebook Effect

There's no way that a book about social networking and technology and social-networking technology wouldn't unfold in and around a bunch of meetings, and, boy, is The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, by David Kirkpatrick, ever the mother lode. Beginning with late-night brainstorming and coding sessions when Mark Zuckerberg and Co. were still at Harvard, through sitdowns with potential investors in Silicon Valley, to internal meetings and industry conferences and Facebook's own events -- the world's biggest virtual-communication company is all about the face-to-face.

Indeed, the book begins with the story of a civil engineer in Colombia who used Facebook to arrange a protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that was attended by millions of people worldwide in February 2008. As Zuckerberg tells Kirkpatrick: "We did some thinking and we decided that the core value of Facebook is in the set of friend connections. We call that the social graph, in the mathematical sense of a series of nodes and connections. The nodes are the individuals and the connections are the friendships. ... We have the most powerful distribution mechanism that's been created in a generation."

Convene Reads: "Inside the Secret Service"

Believe it or not, this guy works the reg desk.

One of the consistent themes we've explored on this blog, as well as in the pages of Convene, is the fact that, pretty much everyone who does anything attends meetings.  On a recent business trip to Chicago, I was riding in a cab from O'Hare with my executive editor, and noted that nearly every story in The New Yorker, a favorite magazine of mine, is based on or somehow centered around a meeting or convention.  (The particular story that sparked this observation was about the debate over the need to protect Earth from asteroid and comet strikes, and involved a visit by the writer to NASA's Ad Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense, held this past July at a hotel in Boulder, Colo.)

But one thing we haven't explored as extensively is the fact that a lot of people who aren't officially meeting planners often fulfill that capacity — including, as I learned in the March 2011 issue of The Atlantic, Secret Service agents.

Convene Reads: This Republic of Suffering

In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust explores how the deaths of more than six hundred thousand Union and Confederate soldiers over the course of four years  changed the United States -- in ways profound and prosaic, obvious and unexpected. The book is deeply researched and quietly moving, and, this being a work of history, of course there are meetings and conventions aplenty:

Certainly, [free man of color Captain Andre Cailloux's] death became a symbol for the northern antislavery cause and particularly for black abolitionists. The flag Cailloux had carried at Port Hudson was prominently displayed at the National Negro Convention presided over by Frederick Douglass in October 1864. Cailloux's death -- configured as heroic sacrifice -- made a powerful case for blacks' rights to citizenship in the nation they had given so much to save.

Here's another one:

Spiritualists held their first national convention in Chicago in 1864, marking a growing prominence and self-consciousness that extended well beyond the realm of popular amusement. "Virtually everyone," historian R. Laurence Moore has observed, "conceded that spirit communication was at least a possibility." Amid a war that was erasing not only lives but identities, the promise, as one spiritualist spokesman wrote, of the "imperishability of the individual and the continuation of the identical Ego" after death was for many irresistible.

Interesting that in both cases, the holding of the convention in and of itself is a symbol of something -- the dawning awareness of exactly why the Civil War was being fought, and the desperate need to believe that the Union and Confederate dead were not beyond all reach.

Convene Reads: The Sherlockian

The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore, uses meetings as a springboard, launching its fun, clever plot with the murder of the world's foremost Sherlock Holmes scholar in his New York City hotel room during a conference of the Baker Street Irregulars -- a real-life organization of Holmes devotees. The rest of the novel is taken up with the investigation of the murder by another Sherlockian, interspersed with passages about Arthur Conan Doyle himself tracking a serial killer in Victorian London. And, from time to time, Moore fills in details about how the Sherlockians convene:

The Irregulars' dinner, held this year at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fourth Street, fell amid a grand week of Sherlockiana. For four days around January 6, Holmes' birthday, all the world's societies devoted to the celebration of Sherlock Holmes gathered in New York. Lectures, tours, book signings, sales of Victorian antiques and first-edition printings -- for a Sherlock Holmes devotee, it was heaven.

You can do without one of your attendees getting murdered, for sure, but wouldn't it be nice if everyone else described your meeting as heaven?

Convene Reads: War

Meetings and conferences have always played a key role in the world of warfare -- from planning battles to negotiating peace treaties -- but, still, it's a little jarring to see one pop up in the middle of Sebastian Junger's War. The book follows a U.S. Army platoon deployed in Afghanistan's harrowing Korengal Valley -- "too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off" -- and Junger's account is determinedly ground-level, following the soldiers through the thrill, boredom, relief, agony, triumph, and ultimate hell of near-endless combat.

Sometimes the fighting stops, at least for a little while. In one of those cases, the result is this riveting scene:

A few days after I arrive, [Captain Dan] Kearney puts together a shura of valley elders, and the provincial government flies in for it. The meeting starts in what must have been a rather incredible way for the locals: a young American women from USAID speaking in Pashto about plans for the valley. After that, the governor gives a passionate speech about what this area could be if the locals stopped fighting and accepted government authority. He's dressed in a suit and vest, and it's quite possibly the first suit and vest the locals have ever seen. When he's done a young man stands up, eyes bright with hate, and says that the Americans dropped a bomb on his brother's house in Kalaygal and killed thirteen people. "If the Americans can't bring security with their guns and bombs, then they should just leave the valley," he shouts. "Otherwise there will be jihad!"

Convene Reads: The Wave

* This photo, of Tahiti's Teahupoo wave, is courtesy of Duncan Rawlinson

I've been meaning to write a new post for a while now, as I've been reading (and am now nearly finished with) this great book called The Wave: In the Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey, the editor in chief of O, The Oprah Magazine.

I'm a bit nuts about the sea — so it was cool to read about a gathering of others who share the same obsession (albeit in a much more science-y way). Casey writes about the Tenth International Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting and Coastal Hazard Symposium, which she attended at Oahu's Turtle Bay Resort in 2007:

Every two years the world's most eminent wave scientists gather somewhere to exchange information, present papers, compare notes, and above all, to argue.

Convene Reads: The Passage

We already know, from a previous Convene Reads item, that meetings will be a part of our (fictional) dystopian future. Now we have evidence that meetings will be a part of our (fictional) post-apocalpytic future, thanks to The Passage, by Justin Cronin, a compulsively readable brick of a summer read that imagines the world after a military experiment has unleashed a plague of vampire-like creatures throughout North America (and possibly the rest of the world). Civilization crumbles, and a hundred years later, survivors are  clustered in small, precariously defended colonies. But we know mankind gets through it, because occasionally Cronin includes journal excerpts from various survivors that are set up this way:

From the Journal of Ida Jaxon ("The Book of Auntie")
Presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period
Center for the Study of Human Cultures and Conflicts
University of New South Wales, Indo-Australian Republic
April 16-21, 1003 A.V.

"A.V." stands for "After Virus," and the outbreak happens in 2018 -- which means the "Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period" is held in the year 3021. The implication for meeting planners is clear: Save your records, because you never know when future civilizations will need them to help pick up the pieces.

Convene Reads: The Big Short

Don't read The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis, if you're trying to keep your blood pressure down, because what this book makes clear about the economic meltdown of 2007-2008 is that it was triggered by Wall Street insiders -- bankers, bond traders, stockbrokers, hedge-fund managers -- who either didn't know what they were doing, or knew but didn't care. In creating, selling, and buying credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and other increasingly baroque financial instruments built on a foundation of shoddy subprime mortgages, Lewis writes, they were "either crooks or morons." They made billions before losing trillions of dollars of other people's money, and it would be nothing more than depressing and enraging if Lewis weren't such a great reporter and storyteller, going behind the scenes of the financial crisis from the point of view of a handful of people who bet against this insane bubble.

Convene Reads: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

You don't have to look hard to find meetings all over a book like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, a graceful and absorbing biography of both a woman and the "immortal" cell line  -- the first ever in the world -- that she unknowingly contributed to medical research, and that would play an instrumental role in the development of the polio vaccine, gene mapping, and countless other life-saving cancer treatments. The topic is medicine and medical ethics, after all, which means that much of the history of HeLa -- the cell line that was grown, and still grows today, from cells taken from the cervical cancer that killed Henrietta Lacks in 1951 -- played out in a veritable Petri dish of conferences, symposiums, panel discussions, and congressional inquiries.

All of that gets due mention throughout Skloot's book. But what's really impressive is that HeLa itself has its own annual meeting: the HeLa Cancer Control Symposium, first organized in 1996 by Roland Pattillo, MD, an obstetrics and gynecology professor at Morehouse School of Medicine who during his medical training worked with the Johns Hopkins biologist who first cultivated HeLa:

[Pattillo] was the first in his family to go to school, and when he learned about Henrietta as a postdoctoral fellow in Gey's lab, he felt immediately connected to her. He'd wanted to honor her contributions to science ever since. So on October 11, 1996, at Morehouse School of Medicine, he organized the first annual HeLa Cancer Control Symposium. He invited researchers from around the world to present scientific papers on cancer in minorities, and he petitioned the city of Atlanta to name October 11, the date of the conference, Henrietta Lacks Day. The city agreed and gave him an official proclamation from the mayor's office.

This snippet in no way does justice to this deeply researched and elegantly written book, which starkly contrasts the multibillion-dollar industry that has grown up around HeLa with the plight of Henrietta Lacks' family, many of whom live in and around Baltimore today and can't even afford health insurance.  It offers no easy answers, but gives you plenty to think about -- which is another way that it naturally intersects with meetings and conferences.

Convene Reads: Last Call

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent, is one of those great books that's about so much more than its ostensible subject. In telling the story of the Eighteenth Amendment -- which from 1920 until it was repealed in 1933 made it illegal for alcoholic beverages to be manufactured, transported, or sold within the United States -- Okrent also tells the story of women's suffrage, the federal income tax, international trade, organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, immigration, Democrats and Republicans, men and women, sacramental wine, Welch's Grape Juice, and cigarette boats. And, of course, meetings and conventions, which over the course of decades is where Prohibition was discussed, debated, extolled, condemned, enacted, and repealed. Indeed, more pages than not in Last Call seem to mention a meeting of some kind, somewhere.

Here are just a few examples, beginning some 70 years before America went dry:

"[Susan B.] Anthony had given her first public speech in 1849, to a group called the Daughters of Temperance. ... In 1852 she was not allowed to address an Albany meeting of the Sons of Temperance specifically because she was a woman. "The sisters," said the group's chairman, were there not to speak but "to listen and learn." The same year, at a New York State Temperance Society meeting in Syracuse, the same result. It happened again, at a World Temperance Society convention in New York City.... Finally Anthony cast her lot with [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton (who had declared alcohol "The Unclean Thing") and proceeded to give half a century's labors to the cause of suffrage."

Around the turn of the century, as the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) gained ground:

"Thomas Gilmore, [United States Brewers' Association Secretary Hugh] Fox's counterpart over at the liquor distillers office, told his employers at their 1908 convention in Louisville that the ASL was 'the most remarkable movement that this country has ever known.'"

During World War I, when Prohibition forces attacked the German-American-dominated U.S. Brewers' Association:

"'Does anyone doubt,' [ASL Superintendent Purley A.] Baker asked an ASL conference in Columbus, 'in the light of the immediate past, that if there had not been a strong, virile Prohibition movement to combat the propaganda of this disloyal but well-financed organization, that American would have been sufficiently Germanized to have kept her out of the war?'"

In 1924, four years into Prohibition, when the Democratic National Convention was held in New York City:

"Official 'reception committees' could direct the visiting delegate to Manhattan's five thousand speakeasies; unofficial hosts -- hotel bellmen, cabbies, prostitutes -- knew where to get a bottle a delegate could enjoy in his room. 'Good rye is hardly obtainable,' Variety had said in one of its regular market reports, so Democrats had to make do with lesser merchandise. Wet operatives kept dry leaders entertained at endless social events, almost as if trying to seduce them with the wonders of Sodom."

And in February 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed Prohibition, was ratified:

"The remaining two clauses outlawed the transportation of intoxicating liquors into states that chose to forbid it and stipulated a ratification process requiring approval not by state legislatures but by state conventions called for this specific purpose."

Today, of course, the relationship between intoxicating liquors and meetings is better, shall we say, understood.

Convene Reads: Metatropolis

Even in the future, when a combination of dwindling natural resources and increasingly nimble technology creates a semi-dystopian world where international borders mean nothing and some cities have swelled into self-enclosed nation-states -- even then, there will be meetings and conferences. How do I know? I just finished reading Metatropolis, a collection of short stories, edited by John Scalzi, that explore how urban environments might evolve -- and devolve -- in the coming decades and centuries. In one of the stories, "To Hie From Far Cilenia," by Karl Schroeder, people are able to use other people as their flesh-and-blood avatars -- called "cyranoids" -- anywhere else in the world. One of Schroeder's characters, who physically is in Stockholm but who has been living in an "augmented reality" city called Oversatch, describes using a cyranoid in Brazil:

"It was in Sao Paolo. You know Oversatch has been sponsoring me to attend conferences, so I was riding a local cyranoid  at an international symposium on vanishing rain forest cultures. We were off in a English breakaway session with about ten other people, some of whom I knew -- but of course I was pretending to be a postdoc from Brasilia, or rather my cyranoid was -- you know what I mean."

So not only will there still be physical conferences when everything else in the world is virtual, there will still be breakout sessions. Comforting, no? But you might want to start thinking about specific programs to accommodate cyranoids at your next meeting.

Convene Reads: The Imperfectionists

During its short life, Convene Reads has confined itself to nonfiction -- until now. Yes, that's right, meetings and conferences are also part of the world of make-believe, including the new novel The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman, which is a wry look at an English-language international newspaper based in Rome. At one point, the paper's editor-in-chief, Kathleen Solson, she participates in a panel discussion at a media conference that will sound familiar to any meeting planner who has created "the future of our industry"-style programming:

The subject of the panel discussion is "How the International Press Views Italy," an enduring preoccupation in the country. She resents having to attend -- it's clearly a task for their young publisher, Oliver Ott. But he has gone missing again and ignores her phone calls. So the conference is left to Kathleen and the paper must manage in her absence. It is not managing well, if the constant stream of text messages on her BlackBerry is any indication.

"Will the newspaper industry survive?" the mediator asks her.

"Absolutely," she tells the audience. "We'll keep going, I assure you of that. Obviously, we're living in an era when technology is moving at an unheralded pace. I can't tell you if in fifty years we'll be publishing in the same format. Actually, I can probably tell you we won't be publishing in the same way,  that we'll be innovating then, just as we are now. But I assure you of this: news will survive, and quality coverage will always earn a premium. Whatever you want to call it -- news, text, content -- someone has to report it, someone has to write it, someone has to edit it. And I intend for us to do it better, no matter the medium."

Is it me, or do Kathleen's remarks work equally well as a stirring defense of face-to-face meetings?

Convene Reads: The Poisoner's Handbook

Contrary to what "CSI" and "Quincy, M.E." might have us believe, science-based criminal investigation hasn't always been a fact of life. In The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum tells the fascinating story of how forensic toxicology came to be -- and how easy it once was to poison someone and get away with it. The heroes of her story are Charles Norris, who in 1918 was appointed the first-ever chief medical examiner of New York City, and Alexander Gettler, Norris' toxicologist. Together, Norris and Gettler helped elevate and standardize the field of forensic medicine, with a particular emphasis on toxic industrial products such as arsenic, mercury, carbon monoxide, chloroform, and radium. How did they do it? Well, in 1922, there was this meeting:

That September Norris caught a train to Washington, D.C., to meet with representatives from other cities -- a coroner's physician from Chicago, a pathologist from Johns Hopkins, a chemistry expert from Cornell Medical College, and the revered medical examiner from Boston, George McGrath, who had created one of the first professional programs in the country. They agreed to form a committee, pool their resources, and hire someone to investigate the state of forensic medicine through the country -- "the training and qualifications of the men performing this important work in the various large cities" -- so that they could start setting some national standards.

A face-to-face meeting and an initiative to create national standards. Is there nothing new under the sun?

Convene Reads: Contested Will

Maybe you haven't heard of the Shakespeare authorship controversy -- but it certainly has heard of you. Scattered throughout an interesting new book on the subject, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, by James Shapiro, are references to meetings and conferences at which the question of whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon actually wrote the plays that are attributed to him has been discussed ad infinitum. Shapiro thinks Shakespeare himself wrote them, and makes a strong case. Sigmund Freud eventually came to believe he didn't, but not before putting one of Shakespeare's greatest creations on the couch -- and on the dais:

Followers and patients flocked to Freud, and psychoanalysis thrived. Hamlet became a canonical psychoanalytic text as well as a favorite subject of the Wednesday Psychological Society meetings, where Freud explored with his disciples how Shakespeare had written the play as "a reaction to the death of his father."

Shapiro even gauges the success of an "anti-Stratfordian" organization by tracking attendance at one of its conferences:

Membership in the Shakespeare Oxford Society now stood at eighty -- and an attempt to generate new ideas and enthusiasm through a conference in 1976 drew only twenty members. Oxfordians would subsequently speak of this postwar period of decline and stagnation as their "Dark Ages."

As someone once wrote (sort of): "There are more face-to-face meetings in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Convene Reads: Doing Good by Doing Delicious

Last Friday evening was one of the first warm evenings of the season, and hundreds of New Yorkers had the same idea that I had -- to head to Madison Square Park to the Shake Shack. The long lines of people waiting for burgers, hot dogs, and milk shakes at the 20-by-20-foot kiosk literally are a joke: Shake Shack sells baby onesies that read: "I waited 9 months ... this line ain't that bad."

In Setting the Table, NYC restaurateur Danny Meyer, who operates the Shake Shack along with six other highly successful restaurants, presents the kiosk as a prime example of "doing well by doing good." A percentage of every sale goes to the Madison Square Park Conservancy, which in turn plows it back into the park, making it the kind of safe, beautiful place where you don't mind (too much) standing in line.

Investing in the community is a core philosophy for Meyer. He hosted one of the very first food-related fundraisers for Union Square Park and has continued to be instrumental in organizing and participating in culinary fundraisers to benefit the park. (For more on Union Square Park's rebirth, see our November 2008 profile of Fred Kent, founder of the Project for Public Spaces.)

By taking active leadership roles in working to revitalize two great city parks that anchor the neighborhoods in which we do business, we've demonstrated that a rising tide lifts all boats. The component of enlightened hospitality has beautified our neighborhood, and in turn has enhanced our business.

It's nice to know that Meyer feels your pain, line-wise. The burger stand has installed a Shack Shack cam, so you can check the lengths of the line online.

(This is the second part of a series digging into Setting the Table. Read an earlier post here.)

Convene Reads: Setting the Table

I’ve been meaning to read NYC restaurateur Danny Meyer’s 2006 book Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business for months. And now that I’ve finally picked it up, I can hardly put it back down.

The story of how Meyer built one of the most successful restaurant organizations in the country from scratch makes for compelling reading. Refreshingly, Meyer doesn’t paint himself as a genius or a saint: he tells about the time he got into a fistfight with a customer at his first restaurant (he was overworked and underfed), and admits that he spilled a glass of wine all over actress Mariel Hemingway because he was ogling her cleavage.

But it’s when Meyer talks about things like how he prioritizes business stakeholders that things get really interesting. (Seriously.)

Meyer names five primary stakeholders to which the company offers “the most caring hospitality,” and ranks them in this order: 1) employees 2) guests 3) community 4) suppliers and, finally, 5) investors.

That employees come first, even ahead of customers, in such a service-oriented field frankly surprised me a little. But as Meyer explains, his restaurants can only earn raves and customer loyalty if employees are jazzed about coming to work.

Well before our staff members can extend any kind of meaningful hospitality to our guests, they need to first understand the primary importance of being on each other’s side. Mutual respect and trust are the most powerful tools for building an energetic, motivated, winning team in any field. And the most talented employees are often those attracted to companies that can provide them with the most important job benefit of all: other great people with whom to work.

There’s so much to chew on in Setting the Table, I’m going to bring more of it to you over the next couple of weeks. In courses, so to speak.

Next up: Why reaching out to the community is in a company’s best interest.

Convene Reads: Nothing to Envy

In Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick sketches a portrait of life inside North Korea by profiling six people who have managed to defect to South Korea -- including Kim Hyuck, who spent 20 months in one of North Korea's unforgiving labor camps. Demick writes:

"Nobody ever thinks they are going to die. They all think they will survive and see their families again, but then it just happens," Hyuck told me years later when he was living in Seoul. He had returned not long before from a human rights conference in Warsaw where he testified. Afterward he toured Auschwitz and noted the parallels with his own experience. In his labor camp, nobody was gassed -- if they were too weak to work they were sent to another prison. Although some were executed and some were beaten, the primary means of inflicting punishment was withholding food. Starvation was the way the regime preferred to eliminate its opponents.

Hyuck's story is harrowing, as is Demick's entire book. But maybe we can take some small comfort in the fact that conferences of the type that Hyuck attended in Warsaw are helping shine a light on situations like this.