Showing results by author "Donald Davis" in All Categories

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."

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.

We all have our personal phobias and white-knuckle moments. The title story of Irrational Fear tells of Davis's mother's fear of snakes and the way she eventually got even with him for making fun of her. (She always came out on top.) The second story, "The Red Coat", tells why his father and his father's brother-in-law finally stopped playing Christmas tricks on their sisters and wives. Here's another hilarious send-up from one of America's favorite storytellers.

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.

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.

"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."

The Real Jerry Lewis Story, penned by Rick Saphire, who notably served as Jerry Lewis’s personal manager, offers an intimate and detailed portrait of the legendary comedian. Saphire’s unique vantage point provides listeners with exclusive behind-the-scenes insights that only someone closely associated with Lewis could offer. The book navigates through various stages of Lewis’s illustrious career, shedding light on his comedic genius, professional triumphs, and personal challenges.

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.

From the heart of the Appalachian Mountains come these folktales and folk rhymes for young children. In this recording of timeless children's tales, Davis, one of our most gifted storytellers, weaves for a new generation the same tales his grandmother told him as he sat in her lap so many years ago.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was a time during Donald Davis's college freshman year when he wasn't really sure if he wanted to claim his hometown of Sulpher Springs, North Carolina. But a boy by the name of Stanley Easter changed his mind. "The year after that," he recalls, "I did go home from college for Thanksgiving. In fact, I had now become so proud of where I was from that I could hardly wait to get home. I no longer had to lie about where I was from. The world of childhood was quickly becoming a dear place to visit."

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.

There was a time during Donald Davis's college freshman year when he wasn't really sure he wanted to claim his hometown of Sulpher Springs, North Carolina. But a boy by the name of Stanley Easter changed Davis's mind.

*This program is abridged* An American general is captured in the Middle East. They threaten to behead him within days. But moments before he is rendered unconscious during the attack, the General realizes that his unseen captors are American. Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson, a top level Marine...

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 In Baghdad's Green Zone, an Iraqi scientist is...

Five exciting novelisations set in Earth's past history, featuring the Doctor and his companions. The stories are Doctor Who - The Gunfighters, Doctor Who - The Highlanders, Doctor Who and the War Games, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang and Doctor Who - Black Orchid.

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.