Showing results by author "Donald Davis" in All Categories

At a 15th Century castle outside Edinburgh, Scotland, Sir Geoffrey Cornwell is brokering an unprecedented agreement. Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the Israeli Foreign Minister are scheduled to sign an historic peace treaty—that is, until their meeting is violently interrupted by a missile strike that leaves the Foreign Minister of Israel dead and Cornwell and the Prince injured. Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson is running covert missions in the mountains of Pakistan when he's called away from duty.

Growing up in North Carolina, Donald Davis heard stories that came to America through Scots-Irish immigrants about a fellow named Jack who was so real that young Davis thought he was a distant relative or otherside-of-the-mountain neighbor. Now Davis knows that Jack is a universal legendary figure who, by various names, is found in nearly every culture.

Kyle is captured and thrown in prison. Lauren is accused of being a double agent. The one person they trust to help is the man who sent them on the black operation - Jim Hall, a legendary CIA agent, Kyle's sniper mentor, and Lauren's boss and former lover. But Hall has gone rogue. He is selling America's innermost secrets to a ruthless Pakistani warlord who wants to mold al-Qaeda into a legitimate political party and secure a nuclear arsenal.

Now Coughlin has written a highly personal story about his deadly craft, taking readers deep inside an invisible society that is off-limits to outsiders. This is not a heroic battlefield memoir but the careful study of an exceptional man who must keep his sanity while carrying forward one of the deadliest legacies in the U.S. military today.

Before 1910 the American chestnut was one of the most common trees in the eastern United States. An important natural resource, chestnut wood was preferred for woodworking, fencing, and building construction, as it was rot resistant and straight grained. The hearty and delicious nuts also fed wildlife, people, and livestock.

In the hills of Appalachia, humor and wisdom are mixed up forever in funny, wise stories that seem to grow more lustrous with each telling. Here are two of the best: "Uncle Frank Invents the Electron Microphone", Appalachian folk wisdom rolled into one of Davis' funniest stories; "Uncle Frank and the Crown Feed Boys", Davis' legendary Uncle Frank teaches a couple of traveling salesmen the lesson of their lives.

The warmth of the Christmas season is condensed into this single collection that will rekindle your Christmas memories. Who doesn't remember Christmas at Grandma's? The living room aglow with family and friends, the kitchen like a factory of sweet aromas, the relatives everywhere! Donald Davis captures the spirit of Christmas as seen through the eyes of a child in these stories: "Christmas in Sulpher Springs", "The Children's Christmas Party", "The Year My Brother Almost Died", and "The Red Scooters."

Grandma's house was a magical place, and in this vivid memoir, Donald Davis makes it possible for each of us to go back to our own grandma's kitchen, clutter room, living room, and to that immeasurable bed that seemed to swallow us whole. This selection also contains a traditional story Davis learned from his grandmother, one handed down through his family from generations who once lived in Scotland before coming to the Appalachian mountains, about the time that fortune-seeker named Jack made the king mad.

Storyteller Donald Davis had a very sensible mother. She had a pretty good idea of what boys would do, so she was always on the lookout. As Davis later learned, always being on the lookout is what mamas do. His vigilant but gentle mother gave her son multiple gifts in life and, as we learn in the end, gifts that do not end with her passing.

An eccentric schoolteacher and a widow-lady babysitter are the heroines in these new digital studio recordings of Donald Davis' two all-time most-requested stories. "It was the 42nd year she had taught fourth grade", yet there was nothing routine about Miss Daisy or her methods. Rather than settle for textbook work (Miss Daisy left textbooks in the big closet) she took her class on a year-long imaginary world tour.

Two new Appalachian stories from the author of the award winning Listening for the Crack of Dawn; an ideal introduction to contemporary storytelling for adults. Both stories are based upon real people. In the first, a disastrous birthday enables a child to learn more than an adult possibly could. In the second, two unusual people live their conviction that people are more important than things.

Deemed "irreplaceable" by Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson assumed his nickname during the Battle of Bull Run in the Civil War. It is said that the Army of Northern Virginia never fully recovered from the loss of Jackson's leadership when he was accidentally shot by one of his own men and died in 1863.

Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, a top level Marine sniper, receives top-secret orders to rescue the General. But upon landing in the Iraqi desert his men come under ferocious attack and Swanson is the only one left alive. How did the enemy know details of a mission known only to a few top government officials? Swanson soon realizes he is fighting a particularly ruthless and dangerous enemy—American mercenaries working with the White House. They're part of a clandestine conspiracy whose agenda is nothing less than total control of the American military.

We all know someone like them: women whose lives revolve around their cats. Here Donald Davis paints verbal portraits of two very different women in his life who shared a fiercely unshakable sense of priorities. It was simply understood that the cats came first, and once you accepted that, everything else made perfect sense. Employing his trademark Carolina drawl, droll wit, and sharp observations, Davis is in top form here as he pays homage to these two remarkable women and their devotion to their feline families.

Traditional values abound in these hilarious stories from Appalachia: friendship, family, orderliness, humor, and delight in an especially inventive practical joke. In "Rainy Weather", a hound dog with more heart than sense wins everyone's admiration. "Uncle Frank Learns to Speak Polish" finds Davis' famous Uncle Frank making the most of a little foreign language. And, in "Uncle Frank Clean Up the Post Office", cleanliness is next to godliness, and it's also next to hilarity.

Old Man Hawkins was a larger-than-life character among deer hunters, or, more precisely, among tellers and hearers of tall tales. His self-proclaimed method of hunting deer by holding a mirror in one hand and his rifle in the other, pointing backward over a shoulder, was, he said, "to be fair to the deer". It was a story, Davis tells us, that would occupy his father on the drive to Grandma's house.

This great collection contains the soundtracks of three television adventures in which the Doctor and friends travel back in Time and get caught up in events in history.

For 16 years, Donald Davis has performed during the Christmas season at Fearrington Village, a unique destination community near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Hundreds of people fill the seats in this historic barn, now converted for use as an events venue. Recorded live at Davis's December 15, 2007, performance, this audio captures the familiar and special relationship between a skilled and beloved storyteller and the audience that has sustained him year after year.

Kyle Swanson, once the top sniper in the Marine Corps, has become the key member in a secret special operations team known as Task Force Trident. When Juba tests the new weapon by killing hundreds of people at a British royal wedding in London, Swanson is assigned to hunt down his old special ops rival. The birth of a new reign of global terror can be stopped only by a confrontation between the two best snipers in the world, a duel in which the first shot wins. Usually.

Joe Davis was in his mid-40s when he became a father, and the experience he was able to apply in raising his sons lent creativity to his parenting. The five stories here recall the wisdom of fathers with humor and rich detail: a visit to the Smithsonian inspires father's memory; father "cures" a boy's impulse to try cigarettes; Santa Claus learns an important lesson; and someone plays a trick on a visiting preacher.