The Best of Friends; Two Women, Two Continents, and One Enduring Friendship

viii, [2], 337, [5] pages. Illustrations. Signed by both authors on the half-title page. Some pages off-white. Includes Preface. Now, in their heartfelt memoir, Ginger Mauney and Sara James alternately narrate the story of how, they, two women separated by thousands of miles, have found themselves bound together through temperament, circumstance, and serendipity. The Best of Friends uses the example of their lives to explore such universal questions as: When your heart is broken, how do you heal? How do you realize your dreams without compromising yourself? How do you tame ambition to make room for love and family? And what does it mean as an adult to be a "best" friend? This is also the story of so many women in their twenties, thirties, and forties who, with the help of friends, dared to reinvent their lives just when it seemed that everything was falling apart. Sara and Ginger have a friendship that so many modern women can understand--complicated and simple at the same time. Women who in many ways are opposites, yet have a powerful connection that can only be called "sisterhood." Sara James is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and author. Sara has covered news events in Australasia for NBC, CNN and PBS. Sara covered the 2012 tour of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge to Singapore, Malaysia and the Solomon Islands. She reported on the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch and the 2009 bush fires in Victoria. She served as substitute newsreader on the NBC Today Show, was a frequent co-anchor of Weekend Today and often anchored MSNBC. Wildlife filmmaker Ginger Mauney has had her films broadcast on the National Geographic Channel and the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, and on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. In 2007, Mauney, working with her childhood friend Sara James, composed a memoir of their lives, beginning with the time they spent together as girls and continuing through their parallel (yet quite different) careers. The two grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where they were "friends from the age of twelve, when they first shared secrets at a sleepover party," stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Later, the two grew up and went their separate ways, only to reunite after a decade-long absence from one another's lives. While James became an award-winning television journalist, Mauney turned to documentary filmmaking, creating movies that told stories about the animals inhabiting the wild areas of her adopted country, Namibia. In The Best of Friends: Two Women, Two Continents, and One Enduring Friendship, James and Mauney, wrote the Kirkus Reviews contributor, "look back over the years of friendship that sustained them through the ups and downs of their . lives." The concept for a book on friendship, James revealed in a joint interview with Mauney published on the Web site iVillage, "actually came to me quite suddenly one day when I was on a road trip. It was one of those moments where you mull over life, and think about how you got from where you started to where you are now. In my case," she continued, she was "sitting in a car with a man from 10,000 miles away whom I had just married. And at that moment, it occurred to me that the person who understood that better than anything was my dear friend Ginger, because her life was so similar. Except for the fact that it was absolutely opposite." However, the attraction that drew them back into their friendship, the two authors agree, is based not on the ways in which their lives are now alike, but on their shared past. "They believe that what binds them together," declared Heather Byer in the New York Times Book Review, "is not their great desire to achieve but the durability of a friendship that has lasted decades." "With candor, insight, and wisdom," Carol Haggas wrote in her Booklist review, "James and Mauney joyfully celebrate the inspiring essence of friendship." From sharing secrets as children to chasing unconventional dreams as adults, network.…