Andrew Gifford (1)
Autor von We All Scream: The Fall of the Gifford's Ice Cream Empire
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SqueakyChu | 1 weitere Rezension | Jun 16, 2017 | WE ALL SCREAM was a totally unexpected surprise to me, because it was just so damn GOOD! I probably shouldn't have been so surprised, given that about all I knew about author Andrew Gifford was that he is the founder of the Santa Fe Writers Project. Here's what the SFWP website says -
"The company was founded in 1998 by Andrew Gifford who, one night, at the El Dorado Hotel in Santa Fe, decided to dedicate his life to the preservation of literature. SFWP embraces this mission of artistic preservation, recognizing exciting new authors, and bringing out of print work back to the shelves."
Sounds great - and in fact it is. I've had the pleasure of reading three SFWP books, all back from the out-of-print netherworld. They are: Ray Robertson's MOODY FOOD and Richard Currey's FATAL LIGHT and WARS OF HEAVEN. All were excellent.
And now here is this totally unexpected and deeply affecting memoir from Andrew Gifford himself - a moving and often shocking story of a deeply disturbed family, an historical document of the Gifford family's "ice cream empire" that is legend in the Washington beltway region, and an unsolved mystery involving the embezzlement of millions of dollars.
Less than fifty pages into the book I knew I was going to like it. Gifford was an only child, largely neglected and left to his own devices from an early age. He took refuge in television and books - comic books, sci-fi and fantasy. But he soon realized that television -
"... was too repetitive. But books seemed infinite ... At some point, it dawned on me that I would die before I ran out of reading material. In this, I found great comfort. There would always be a new book to explore."
Yes. I knew when I read this that little Andrew was my kind of kid, and probably my kind of man: a booklover. Books, it seems, enabled him to survive one of the more horrific childhoods I've read about in recent years. Gifford was the only heir to what was at one time a vast fortune. Gifford's Ice Cream and Candy was a small chain of ice cream parlors and stores that prospered from the 1930s into the late 70s. Founded by the author's grandfather, John Gifford. When John died the chain was taken over by Andrew's father, Bob Gifford, also an only child, and that's when the trouble started and the stores began to go downhill. In 1985 Bob Gifford vanished, along with several million dollars from the family business. Bankruptcy, foreclosures and chaos ensued. Andrew was left to cope with his mentally disturbed, abusive, alcoholic and drug-addled mother, and they lived for a time with his maternal grandparents, the Curreys, who had plenty of secrets and problems of their own.
Andrew began to show signs of the abuse, and coped in his own rebellious ways throughout his adolescence. Expelled from Catholic school, he was something of a literary rebel during his HS years in Maryland, working part-time jobs and counting the days until he could leave home. Strings were pulled by his Grandfather Currey to get him into a small private college in West Virginia. He continued to work odd jobs throughout college, knocking heads with administrators, and even dropping out for a year before going back to take a degree in History. During his college years he was stricken with trigeminal neuralgia, an excruciatingly painful and debilitating condition which went undiagnosed for more than a dozen years. Finally, after fourteen years of being treated with powerful cocktails of drugs, Gifford's condition was alleviated through surgery performed by, of all people, Dr. Ben Carson.
Gifford's tale finally becomes a detective story of sorts. Because it is not until after his mother dies - at 47 - that Gifford tries to piece together her tortured life and understand her madness. And that's a whole story in itself. Likewise the shadowy existence of his long-missing father, a man who left no paper trail, who was probably abused by his own father, and remains a troubling mystery to the author. And there are other characters carefully researched here too, his grandfather and his early partners, as well as a shadowy "deep throat" type who knows plenty about Andrew's father's disappearance, but is not very forthcoming. I'm tellin' ya, this is a real page-turner.
An embattled and fought-over ice cream empire gone bust, three generations of a deeply disturbed and troubled family, missing people and millions of dollars gone, and myriad unsolved mysteries. Andrew Gifford's life is a kind of living 'potboiler' of a book, a riveting read. Gifford is a very gifted writer. I was mesmerized. Very highly recommended.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mehr)
"The company was founded in 1998 by Andrew Gifford who, one night, at the El Dorado Hotel in Santa Fe, decided to dedicate his life to the preservation of literature. SFWP embraces this mission of artistic preservation, recognizing exciting new authors, and bringing out of print work back to the shelves."
Sounds great - and in fact it is. I've had the pleasure of reading three SFWP books, all back from the out-of-print netherworld. They are: Ray Robertson's MOODY FOOD and Richard Currey's FATAL LIGHT and WARS OF HEAVEN. All were excellent.
And now here is this totally unexpected and deeply affecting memoir from Andrew Gifford himself - a moving and often shocking story of a deeply disturbed family, an historical document of the Gifford family's "ice cream empire" that is legend in the Washington beltway region, and an unsolved mystery involving the embezzlement of millions of dollars.
Less than fifty pages into the book I knew I was going to like it. Gifford was an only child, largely neglected and left to his own devices from an early age. He took refuge in television and books - comic books, sci-fi and fantasy. But he soon realized that television -
"... was too repetitive. But books seemed infinite ... At some point, it dawned on me that I would die before I ran out of reading material. In this, I found great comfort. There would always be a new book to explore."
Yes. I knew when I read this that little Andrew was my kind of kid, and probably my kind of man: a booklover. Books, it seems, enabled him to survive one of the more horrific childhoods I've read about in recent years. Gifford was the only heir to what was at one time a vast fortune. Gifford's Ice Cream and Candy was a small chain of ice cream parlors and stores that prospered from the 1930s into the late 70s. Founded by the author's grandfather, John Gifford. When John died the chain was taken over by Andrew's father, Bob Gifford, also an only child, and that's when the trouble started and the stores began to go downhill. In 1985 Bob Gifford vanished, along with several million dollars from the family business. Bankruptcy, foreclosures and chaos ensued. Andrew was left to cope with his mentally disturbed, abusive, alcoholic and drug-addled mother, and they lived for a time with his maternal grandparents, the Curreys, who had plenty of secrets and problems of their own.
Andrew began to show signs of the abuse, and coped in his own rebellious ways throughout his adolescence. Expelled from Catholic school, he was something of a literary rebel during his HS years in Maryland, working part-time jobs and counting the days until he could leave home. Strings were pulled by his Grandfather Currey to get him into a small private college in West Virginia. He continued to work odd jobs throughout college, knocking heads with administrators, and even dropping out for a year before going back to take a degree in History. During his college years he was stricken with trigeminal neuralgia, an excruciatingly painful and debilitating condition which went undiagnosed for more than a dozen years. Finally, after fourteen years of being treated with powerful cocktails of drugs, Gifford's condition was alleviated through surgery performed by, of all people, Dr. Ben Carson.
Gifford's tale finally becomes a detective story of sorts. Because it is not until after his mother dies - at 47 - that Gifford tries to piece together her tortured life and understand her madness. And that's a whole story in itself. Likewise the shadowy existence of his long-missing father, a man who left no paper trail, who was probably abused by his own father, and remains a troubling mystery to the author. And there are other characters carefully researched here too, his grandfather and his early partners, as well as a shadowy "deep throat" type who knows plenty about Andrew's father's disappearance, but is not very forthcoming. I'm tellin' ya, this is a real page-turner.
An embattled and fought-over ice cream empire gone bust, three generations of a deeply disturbed and troubled family, missing people and millions of dollars gone, and myriad unsolved mysteries. Andrew Gifford's life is a kind of living 'potboiler' of a book, a riveting read. Gifford is a very gifted writer. I was mesmerized. Very highly recommended.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mehr)
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TimBazzett | 1 weitere Rezension | Feb 12, 2017 | Dir gefällt vielleicht auch
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It was fun to discover the Gifford name a few years ago when, on the Early Reviewers program of LIbraryThing, I learned that Andrew Gifford of the Silver Spring ice cream parlor family fame was running a small press of which I won an advance review copy of one of its books. I was fascinated to discover what happened to Andrew Gifford by googling his information. When I learned that he published a book of his own about his family and was to appear at the Kensington International Day of the Book street festival in April, 2017, I took advantage of the opportunity to meet him and buy his book.
His story about the ice cream parlor's demise is a very troubling one involving mental illness, family dysfunction, and bizarre business practices bordering on criminality. How Andrew Gifford was involved was minimal because he was a child in the store's heyday, but how his family business affected him was deep and sad. I admire the fact that he was able to not only put his difficult past behind him but I am also struck by the fact that he turned his experiences into something good. He had a penchant for writing and publishing. He followed his heart to begin his own small press, an outgrowth of a small publication he did while in school studying something entirely different.
Gifford wove a tremendously interesting story in this book about his family. I liked how he started with himself as a child, and moved backwards in time to fully flesh out his family's interactions. By the time he got around to writing about the family business itself, the reader was quite immersed in and aware of the personalities involved in this troubling story.
I highly recommend this book to those interested in reading about family dysfunction as a way of further understanding mental illness or about an individual's ability to survive adversity. This story reminds me a lot of The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls in that the youngster of a dysfunctional family is a successful survivor. I wanted to cheer for Andrew Gifford when I turned the last page of this book.
Gifford writes...
"To obsess about Gifford's Ice Cream three decades after it vanished from the face of the Earth? Who could possibly do such a thing? Why?...
Maybe it's not about the product. Maybe it is purely about nostalgia."
Yes. Yes, it is.… (mehr)