Books with author Donald Davis

Beginning with some of the earliest he heard as a lap-child, Donald Davis recounts Little Red Hen, Jack and Jill, and The House that Jack Built, a Walking Game. Also includes Davis's own retelling of Jack and the Animals, which is published as a picture book in our August House LittleFolk line. Continuing in a traditional theme, the recording features stories about Jack and a narrative on making molasses with Grandmother that leads into the final story, The Lady in a Syrup Can. Grandma ....

It was the forty-second year she had taught fourth grade, and the A's through GR's were thinking that Miss Daisy had probably seen her better days. A mouse entered the classroom through an open door while the frail figure of a teacher stood before her desk on the first day of school. Her new class thought they were about to see the old woman wither or worse. What followed, however, convinced them that this would not be an ordinary year in elementary school.

The home theater will never replace the drive-in theater in America's imaginary landscape. Donald Davis recalls a summer working under the lax supervision of Daff-Knee Garlic, owner and operator of the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater in rural North Carolina in the early 1960s. Davis recalls his duties at the concession stand, catching slip-ins, and patrolling the back rows. But the story culminates on Labor Day when the last movie, The Guns of Navarrone, is almost over. Davis ....

This is the story of the fighter mission that changed World War II. It is the true story of the man behind Pearl Harbor---Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto---and the courageous young American fliers who flew the million-to-one suicide mission that shot him down.Yamamoto was a cigar-smoking, poker-playing, English-speaking, Harvard-educated expert on America, and that intimate knowledge served him well as architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the next sixteen months, this military genius, beloved by the Japanese people, lived up to his prediction that he would run wild in the Pacific Ocean. He was unable, however, to deal the fatal blow needed to knock America out of the war, and the shaken United States began its march to victory on the bloody island of Guadalcanal.Donald A. Davis meticulously tracks Yamamoto's eventual rendezvous with death. After American code-breakers learned that the admiral would be vulnerable for a few hours, a desperate attempt was launched to bring him down. What was essentially a suicide mission fell to a handful of colorful and expendable U.S. Army pilots from Guadalcanal's battered "Cactus Air Force": - Mississippian John Mitchell, after flunking the West Point entrance exam, entered the army as a buck private. Though not a "natural" as an aviator, he eventually became the highest-scoring army ace on Guadalcanal and the leader of the Yamamoto attack. - Rex Barber grew up in the Oregon countryside and was the oldest surviving son in a tightly knit churchgoing family. A few weeks shy of his college graduation in 1940, the quiet Barber enlisted in the U.S. Army. - "I'm going to be President of the United States," Tom Lanphier once told a friend. Lanphier was the son of a legendary fighter squadron commander and a dazzling storyteller. He viewed his chance at hero status as the start of a promising political career.- December 7, 1941, found Besby Holmes on a Pearl Harbor airstrip, firing his .45 handgun at Japanese fighters. He couldn't get airborne in time to make a serious difference, but his chance would come. - Tall and darkly handsome, Ray Hine used the call sign "Heathcliffe" because he resembled the brooding hero of Wuthering Heights. He was transferred to Guadalcanal just in time to participate in the Yamamoto mission---a mission from which he would never return.They flew the longest over-water fighter mission ever and ambushed and killed Yamamoto. After his death, the Japanese never won another major naval battle. But the victorious American pilots seemed cursed by the samurai spirit of the admiral and were tormented for the rest of their lives by what happened that day. Davis paints unforgettable personal portraits of men in combat and unravels a military mystery that has been covered up at the highest levels of government since the end of the war.

Winner of the Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice AwardThe hills and hamlets of western North Carolina in the 1950's provide the setting for this nostalgic tour de force by Donald Davis, who has appeared in live performance at the World's Fair, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Storytelling Festival, and on National Public Radio. He relates his youth in a cycle of growing-up stories, beginning before he enters school and culminating with the loss of friends to the Vietnam War. The characters are memorable: Miss Daisy―one of the six Boring sisters, teachers every one; Daff-Knee Garlic, owner of the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater; and Aunt Laura, who knows to listen for the crack of dawn. Developed in oral performance, Davis's stories resonate in the experiences of his listeners and readers. These stories will teach readers the importance of caring, fairness and respect.

Winner of Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice AwardDonald Davis grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina hearing stories that most American children have never heard. He did not know he was hearing anything special, but he was, in fact, learning a number of stories that came to America through Scots-Irish immigrants. These stories were still told in the Appalachians during the 1950s and centered around Jack, a universal legendary figure who, by various names, is found in nearly every culture. Jack is that everyman who encounters trials common to all: earning a living, winning a mate, subduing tyrants and ogres of all kinds. Jack wins by conquering his own timidity, by engaging his own wit, by plodding along, or simply by blind luck. Like each of us, Jack seeks to make sense of the world and to find his way in it. These stories from Appalachia America will make readers laugh as well as teach them about the importance of caring, fairness and resourcefulness.

Most people who decide to take the mule ride through the Grand Canyon focus on the spectacular beauty around them. Donald Davis, however, found his focus trained sharply on the 48-inch-wide trail whose ledge drops 700 feet to the Colorado River. Interweaving his trademark humor with vivid detail of perhaps the most remarkable experience offered by the National Park Service, Davis paints for us the stages of this adventure: the gleeful anticipation, the encounter with his own personal mule, the ....

Highly acclaimed, award winning author Donald Davis wants us all to remember and share our family stories. Among other tall tales, he writes about how his uncle hung onto the numerous Democratic votes of the Ratherton clan while at the very same time keeping them from shooting Davis' squirrels in a lean year; how he got Phyleete and wife Jolly and their eleven sub-natural sons and one forgettably natural daughter to move their log house from the unlikely place they'd built it; and how he tried to solve the problem of the chatty Misses Lena and Lucy Leatherwood, who clogged up the eight-party telephone line so badly that Uncle Frank paid for his new phone four months before he ever got the chance to talk on it. Davis offers seventeen vintage family stories, including “Rainy Weather,” “The Southern Bells,” and “Old Man Hawkins' Lucky Day.”

Experience flashes of recognition in moments that transcend Donald Davis's childhood stories.Maybe it's because his mother was a teacher. Or maybe it's because he has spent most of his life in classrooms - as a wide-eyed first grader, a naïve college student, a seminarian, and now as a visiting writer in residencies across the country. There's something about school that infuses the work of Donald Davis and he has collected his all-time favorite school stories in the book. Whether we're traveling around the world with Miss Daisy, the fourth grade teacher who was integrating arithmetic, geography and English before the term “whole language” ever surfaced; or watching in awe as a classmate conjugates malaprops in Miss Vergilius Darwin's Latin class; or driving a school bus and learning about segregation - we experience flashes of recognition in moments that transcend Donald Davis's childhood stories. These coming of age tales will teach readers the importance of caring, citizenship and respect.