The Best of Friends by Sara James

The Best of Friends by Sara James

Transplanting Southern roots to southern Africa, Ginger Mauney has earned the acceptance of a troop of baboons, unraveled mysteries of life and death in an elephant herd, and raised her young son in the wilds of Etosha National Park. During her career as a television journalist, Sara James paid her own way to cover the war in Nicaragua, exposed slavery in Sudan, plunged to the grave site of the Titanic, but struggled to balance work with marriage and motherhood. Though the two lead seemingly opposite lives, there is much they share. A hometown in Richmond, Virginia, an attraction to life on the razor's edge, and a past. Now, in this heartfelt memoir, Sara and Ginger alternately narrate the story of their twenties, thirties, and forties through the lens of a friendship that has spanned thousands of miles and more than thirty years, and reveal how they dared to reinvent their lives, just as it seemed that everything was falling apart.

Sara James is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Melbourne. Her main research interests are in the sociology of work and cultural sociology, with a particular focus on meaning and self-identity. Sara also undertakes research in higher education pedagogy, focusing on the first-year experience. She is co-author of Sociology in Today's World (3rd edition, 2014), an introductory text for sociology students.