Bøker av Stephen Davenport

"What was I going to do with my B.A. in literature: gather the sailors around me just before taps and read Faulkner to them as they fell asleep?"Ensign Stephen Davenport was the most severely underqualified of the Ninety-Day Wonders, the derisive term for commissioned officers in the Naval Reserve with only ninety days of training, all of which were on dry land. For his final navigation exam, he actually plotted a course that landed a fictional destroyer somewhere in the Sierra Mountains. Nevertheless, in August of 1953 he reported to his first assignment aboard the USS Vermillion. He would be overseeing the First Division for training in amphibious landings.Once on ship, Davenport quickly learned that while he held authority in title, respect was less easily learned. The Vermillion' First Division was manned by deckhands who could do things he had no idea how to do - like maneuvering a winch to drop a truck into a landing craft bobbing in the waves thirty feet below without killing its crew, or getting a landing craft on and off a beach through huge surf in the middle of the winter. Davenport just called out orders , and he didn't always feel confident in that either. He fell for dangerous pranks by the crew, permitted an inebriated sailor in his underwear to ride a horse up the gangway, and almost caused a collision at sea. Though he served for only two years, Davenport's time in the Naval Reserve was bizarre, incredible, and absolutely unforgettable. At times hilarious, other times scary, Ninety-Day Wonder is the riveting account of dangers, triumphs and fundamental lessons learned aboard a ship by an inexperienced officer among far more experienced sailors.

There are only two rules at Miss Oliver's School for Girls that lead to automatic expulsion: stealing, and permitting a male who is not a family member into a dormitory. The head of school's daughter has broken both. Trouble approaches on a warm September day when Sylvia Perrine Bickham, the head of school's daughter, gives money

The fate of the beloved school is hanging in the balance...The prestigious boarding school Miss Oliver's School for Girls is on the cusp of going under. The trustees just fired the headmistress of the last thirty-five years, and the alumnae and students are angry and determined to hate her successor, the new-and male-head Fred Kindler. If only he can gain the support of the legendary senior teacher Francis Plummer, then Fred might have a fighting chance to save the school; but no one except Francis's wife and the school librarian, Peggy, is willing to give Fred a chance. With Fred's career on the line and the Plummers' marriage at stake, will Miss Oliver's survive to be the school it once was?