MOULTRIE — The Moultrie-Colquitt County Library will hold An Evening with Local Author Terry Turner, who writes as David Donavan, on Tuesday, May 19, at 6:30 p.m. in the library’s Willcoxon Auditorium. 

The author will discuss his latest book, “Counterinsurgency: What the United States Learned in Vietnam, Chose to Forget, and Needs to Know Today.” Donovan, a former advisor in a counterinsurgency program in Vietnam, uses his personal experiences in Vietnam as well as the experiences of others to discuss major aspects of counterinsurgency giving warning about its failures and suggestions for its success.

David Donovan is the pen name of Terry T. Turner, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. Turner graduated from the University of Georgia in 1967. After active military service as an Army infantry officer, including a tour of duty in Vietnam, he returned to the university for his graduate degrees before going on to post-doctorate work at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, Texas. 

He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1976 where he eventually became full professor both in the Department of Urology and the Department of Cell Biology. Publishing more than 130 scientific articles and book chapters under his own name, Turner chose to write about topics other than science under the pen name of David Donovan. He has written two previous books, “Once a Warrior King” (McGraw-Hill, 1985), which was about his experiences in Vietnam, and “Murphy Station” (University of Tennessee Press, 2010), which was about growing up in the rural South in the era of integration and the cold war. 

Turner is a former president of the American Society of Andrology. He retired from the University of Virginia in 2008 and now resides on his family’s legacy farm in Colquitt County.