Word: davidson
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...counselor, he grew up in Columbus, Ga., with parents who stood out for their affiliation with the G.O.P. "My father believed in individual responsibility and less government," says Glenn. He spent his last three years of high school at Episcopal, a D.C.-area boarding school, before heading off to Davidson College, a favorite of Southern gentry. That was followed by stints as a legislative aide to Cochran, a policy assistant in the Bush White House and convention adviser to the R.N.C...
...Davidson opens up the novel with women cooking the sensual, traditional Greek dish Iman Baildi, which in English means "the priest fainted," hence the title of this book. Although this sounds like a delicious food, its significance in the novel is never fully developed. In fact, the food genre is quickly dropped, which can confuse a reader who thought this novel would be about taking a culinary journey into Greece and getting some heart-to-heart searching along the way. Instead, the novel delves superficially into many "modern" themes and experiences, and the plot line--already thinner than a slice...
...moment seems to be when she ends her relationship with the Greek basketball player, who had been verbally and physically abusing her. Why she needed a trip to Greece and over a hundred pages to learn to stay away from abusive men is beyond the comprehension of most readers. Davidson herself seems to know that the narrator's soul-searching is not quite so deep, as when the narrator speaks about "the rubble of my year in Greece...
...with her daughter. The best part of the book is when the narrator's mother and her best friend meet again after over thirty years, and are afraid to face each other because they do not want to part with the past, when they were young, beautiful and hopeful. Davidson's descriptions of the mother are well-crafted and sad without being overly cheesy or moralistic. The mother is "like a ghost come to life," when she arrives in Greece, and the narrator thinks "she [the mother] looks beautiful, as always. I have just begun to understand how a secret...
...Davidson's first work is a good effort, and in future works, she will probably be able to cross the line between poetry and prose more gracefully. The Priest Fainted, for all its touching themes about the role mothers, daughters and women in general play in life--the book says next to nothing, and whose title is as random and empty as the novel itself...