Showing results by author "Donald Davis" in All Categories

In rural North Carolina, in 1951, despite parental reassurances, a typhoid shot hurt. It hurt even more when the children saw who would be administering the shot: Miss Winnie, a large, dictatorial nurse who had been "especially built by the nursing school so she would never blow away in a hard wind".

In Too Much Hair!, Donald Davis focuses on the trouble with little brothers, especially his own. In the title story, he gives his little brother the haircut he badly needs. The next story explains how he came to be permanently fired as his brother's babysitter. The third tale recounts one of the many science projects for which his brother served as Davis's personal chemistry set. These stories will call forth memories from anyone who has had to live with siblings.

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.

Perhaps the most compelling murder case of our day, the death of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey galvanized the nation - and years after it occurred, the mystery still endures. Who killed the young beauty queen and why? Who is covering up for whom, and who is simply lying? In JonBenet, the most authoritative and comprehensive study of the Ramsey murder, a former lead Boulder Police detective, Steve Thomas, explores the case in vivid and fascinating detail.

A top Russian intelligence agent has defected to the West, and the only man with whom he will speak is Kyle Swanson, who busted him out of the US Marine Corps Scout/Sniper School years ago. The defector proves to be an Edward Snowden-type gold mine of amazing secrets about the when, where and how of President Vladimir Pushkin's next grab for lost Soviet territory. But Swanson, now a special contractor with the CIA, soon begins to believe that it is all fool's gold being sprinkled by Moscow to ignite an open military fight with NATO and the United States.

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.

The Central Intelligence Agency is under attack, and so is its top field operative, Kyle Swanson. The highly decorated former marine corps gunnery sergeant is attending the funeral of a friend when a terrorist blows up the grave. A week later he narrowly survives a grenade attack in Berlin. In Washington, Congress is being told that Swanson has been turned, his private employer is corrupt, and the agency itself cannot be trusted.

An American general is captured by Islamic extremists in the Middle East. They threaten to behead him within days. One strange fact: Moments before he is rendered unconscious during the attack, the general notices that his unseen captors speak American English. What's going on?

In this follow-up to the highly successful Kill Zone, former marine sniper Kyle Swanson faces his most deadly enemy yet, a legendary enemy sniper working with a fringe Islamic organization that has created a terrifying new weapon of mass destruction.

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.

Spain is on the brink of economic collapse, and European banks demand that any bailout be linked to harsh domestic changes. An alliance of Islamic bankers counters with a rescue package containing no conditions at all. The underlying goal: to break the unity of Europe and put Madrid on the path back to Islamic rule. When the United States stridently opposes that deal, terrorists storm the American consulate in Barcelona and slaughter an entire six-man US Marine security guard.

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.

Life Is Short - Art Is Shorter is not just the first anthology gathering both mini-essays and short-short stories. Listeners, writers, and teachers will get an anthology; a course’s worth of writing exercises; a rally for compression, concision, and velocity in an increasingly digital post-religious age; and a meditation on the brevity of human existence.

Broken Bones is a double set of double stories. The first set is made up of a story Davis's grandmother told about the time his mother broke her arm - twice! The second story in the first set is about how his little brother's collarbone was broken - twice! The second set of stories concerns Davis' neighbors, the Leatherwoods, and explains what happens when two big brothers team up against two little brothers. It also tells us that fathers are always smarter than their sons!

If you have never ridden a mule along a 48-inch wide trail whose ledge drops off, in places, 700 feet to the Colorado River, straight down, you may have difficulty picturing the temporary insanity that leads otherwise responsible adults to sign away the remainder of their natural life expectancy just for the chance to see the Grand Canyon's natural beauty close-up.

"Years later," Donald Davis remember of his childhood," I came to realize that when you come from a long-dammed-up Scots-Irish gene pool it is an okay thing to wish for something, but it is not an OK thing to get it."

Donald Davis was born into a southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories. He grew up listening to his father and his Uncle Frank tell stories of their boyhood, all the while taking in the details of his own childhood experience.

Four Jack Tales from the Appalachian oral tradition, recorded by a nationally accalimed storyteller. In this collection, Jack has a little trouble adjusting to the workaday world and to personal financial management. Eventually he works hard enough, but his fortunes do not seem to parallel his productivity. Jack finally has to go a bit out of his way to prove himself, meanwhile dealing with a prospective father-in-law who plays hard to get.

Screen Drive-In Theater hired a young Donald Davis to work his high school summers there. Employment at the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater consisted of working the concession stand, catching "slip-ins", and patrolling the back row to learn about love and life. The theater survives Davis and his friends' summer hijinks until Labor Day.

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.