.png)
Books
An American in Oz
Warm, uplifting and inspiring, An American in Oz will steal your heart. No one thought Sara James, a 30 Rock habitue and Manhattanite through and through, would move to Australia after a long and successful fast-track career reporting from around the globe. But move she did, when her Australian husband Andrew wanted to come home, in a journey that sees her morph from a big-city anchor and correspondent to a small-town mum living an Australian country life. It is an odyssey filled with drama and adventure, both personal and professional, intentional and accidental. We see Australia through New York eyes, and follow Sara’s adventures as she faces head on the challenges of everyday life in a new country with two children, one of whom has special needs. We laugh with her as she drives on the other side of the road, grapples with the Australian vernacular and its penchant for understatement, and ponders the prevalence of local wildlife that could kill. We cheer for her when she sets up the NBC Australasian bureau at from her home in the Wombat Forest, reporting from a specially constructed sound booth in the garage, located between her husband’s Mustang and the chook shed. Most of all, we see a mother, a wife and a reporter determined to create her own Australian memories, not one on loan from her husband.
An Extraordinary School
Special education needs to be just that: first rate; best practice; uncompromising; creative education that enables all of our children to fulfil their potential. Special education needs to be just that: first rate; best practice; uncompromising; creative education that enables all of our children to fulfil their potential. This book is the story of an innovative school that will challenge you to re-think how special education is taught. Port Phillip Specialist School has received national and international recognition as a best-practice model for educating children with special needs. The school has a unique three-pronged approach to education. It uses: a full-service school model, in which a wide-range of educational, medical, paramedical and mental health services operate collaboratively within the school; an integrated model of service delivery, in which teachers, specialists and therapists collaborate to address the specific needs of each student, embedding therapy in all classroom activities; and an arts-based curriculum that uses dance, drama, music and the visual arts to teach literacy, numeracy and living skills. An Extraordinary School will inspire those who want to re-model how special education can be taught and the story of Port Phillip Specialist School illustrates how effective the entire community can be in making change happen. A must-read book for educators, parents, carers and therapists of children with special needs. This book is the result of close collaboration with many people: Bella Irlicht, the former principal of the school who over 20 years developed this school from a one-room, basic facility into the state-of-the-art school it is today; academics Prof. Brian Caldwell, Prof. Martin Comte OAM, and Dr Carl Parsons who worked with Irlicht on the development of the curriculum; teachers and parents.
The Best of Friends
The Best of Friends is James and Mauney’s story, but it 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. 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.