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

by Sara James

Two lives shaped by friendship and reinvention

Regular price $19.83 USD
Regular price $30.99 USD Sale price $19.83 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Two lives shaped by friendship and reinvention

Sara James and Ginger Mauney’s memoir brings together lives that diverge sharply in geography and daily experience: James’s work as a television journalist and Mauney’s years in southern Africa, including life in Etosha National Park. Alternating between their accounts of their twenties, thirties, and forties, the book traces a friendship rooted in Richmond, Virginia, and sustained across continents for more than three decades. Its subjects include journalism, motherhood, risk, and the effort to reshape a life amid personal upheaval.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in memoirs about women’s lives and long-term friendship.
  • Readers drawn to journalism, wildlife, and life in southern Africa.
  • Readers seeking accounts of reinvention across adulthood.

Themes

Enduring friendshipWomen’s livesJournalism and riskMotherhoodReinvention

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

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.

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