BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS: Ginsberg, Goldberg, and Berg
By Tom Teicholz at 25 September, 2008, 11:20 am
The mail can bring some pleasant surprises. Here’s a few I thought I should tell you about: 
The Letters of Allen Ginsberg show him to be a serious debater and proselytizer and it’s just interesting to pop in and out of his relationships over the course with Kerouac, Cassidy, Dylan and others.
This summer I was at a dinner party and found myself seated next to Danny Goldberg the music manager and former record exec - and we talked about Ginsberg — turns out Goldberg had known him and produced a record of his. What I didn’t know, and what Goldberg had a memoir coming out.
Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business
Although I knew Goldberg had edited anthologies, I had no idea he was a former rock journalist and his account of Led Zep and Kurt Cobain had received favorable reviews –in the New York Times no less — as a reminder of when the music industry was fun, and the role played by non-musicians in that world.
Finally, what would a Tommywood blog book list be without the Holocaust managing to intrude. Can’t be helped I suppose. But flip comments aside.
Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and DoraLA local Pierrre Berg’s account of his survival in Auschwitz and at Dora (the infamous forced labor camp where the Germans under the direction of Werner Von Braun built the V2 rockets).
Berg, a gentile was arrested in France as a teenager when he was over at a friend’s house - the Nazis conducted a search found a radio transmitter the kids used to broadcast skits and arrested them. Berg was sent to Drancy and from there to Auschwitz where he was given a red triangle (political prisoner as opposed to yellow for Jews). He closely escaped being hung and being gassed. In early 1945 he was part of a death march out of Auschwitz and eventually was transferred to Dora, and eventually escapes Ravensbruck, hiding with a German communist couple until liberation.
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