Leigh Sales

Leigh Sales is a well-known journalist here in Australia and she's received many awards for her contributions to journalism and her work on the ABC. Having spent years reporting on all manner of breaking news stories, Sales began to wonder how people coped with the life altering experiences and traumatic events and losses she was reporting on. She recognised her role as a journalist was to report often tragic and heartbreaking news, whilst acknowledging that the people she was interviewing show more were often in the midst of their own private nightmare and sometimes even the worst day of their lives.

Sales draws on events ripped straight from Australian headlines that more often than not, began as an ordinary day, informing her title of choice.

Sales interviews Walter Mikac about the Port Arthur Massacre, Stuart Diver about his rescue in Thredbo and subsequent losses and fellow author Hannah Richell about the drowning death of her husband Matt. She speaks to victims and survivors from all walks of life who have faced all manner of traumatic situations from accidents to natural disasters and acts of terrorism. She asks the tough questions about fear, fate, loss, trauma, death, grief, resilience, recovery, healing and hope in an effort to understand how we can better support those going through these events and perhaps even how to prepare ourselves for that one in a million moment.

Leigh Sales has no problem admitting her own shortcomings as a journalist and her fears about delving into the deep and meaningful with those in our community who have had the misfortune of suffering a great loss in some of the most unexpected and newsworthy of ways.

In listening to the audiobook from the library, my only complaint was that I wanted more depth in her research on the topic and I could hear her swallow throughout the entire recording which was very distracting.

Her insights are interesting and informative and while I was already very familiar with the stories of her interviewees, I did find the author's exploration of them moving. The interview with former Prime Minister John Howard was inspiring and I found myself wondering how he would lead us in our current COVID-19 crisis.

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales is full of empathy and is a successful attempt by the author to delve deeper into human nature and our resilience to the unthinkable. In 2019, Leigh Sales received the Walkley Book Award for Any Ordinary Day but for me it was a three star read. Recommended. show less

Do we really need a whole book about the stupid and unprincipled detention of one wrongheaded young man? This turns out to be a gripping, not to say ripping, yarn. Leigh Sales puts faces to the processes of Gitmo and the military tribunals; she gives us the context of David Hicks's story -- his own back story in brief, but at fascinating length the struggles within US military, legal, political and diplomatic circles, and also the Howard government's woefully inadequate response. It's like a show more novel: the story not of David Hicks as hero or victim so much as of a momentous struggle between the rule of law on one side and the need for security on the other, enlivened by a host of minor characters, both human (Terry Hicks as a figure of paternal love worthy of a medieval morality play; the guards at Gitmo who greet each other with call and response 'Honor bound...' '....to defend freedom'; and a host of men and women who struggle to act with decency and integrity in a seriously irrational context) and abstract (bureaucracy, public opinion ...). Leigh Sales covered the David Hicks case for the ABC, and features as one of the minor characters -- memorably as the reporter who accosted Major Mori on his first appearance as Hicks's defence lawyer. This book would serve as a model for how to turn seven years of journalistic coverage into a coherent, engrossing, illuminating book.

http://homepage.mac.com/shawjonathan/iblog/C1020611578/E20070902165621/index.htm... show less

I wonder if I would still be rating this book 5 stars if I were reading it at a different time. So much of what was written resonated with me, and gave me hope.

“If you had asked me before… which of my friends were my favourites, I would have said the funny, charismatic ones: the ones who take you to dinner and make you howl so hard with laughter that it fills your emotional tank. Even when you wake up the next day, fuzzy-headed from lack of sleep and too much wine, you feel great. While show more I still love company like that, I’ve realised that by far the most valuable friends are the kind ones. They may not be the most sparkling guests at the dinner table or the most memorable makers of wedding speeches. But my god, they are the ones you want to sit with you at the worst of times. They are the ones who know the right things to say and do, because their hearts are empathetic. I’ve come to believe that amongst all the good human qualities, there is none greater than kindness.” show less

Odd that I should read two books by Australian authors on the grief of loss within a few weeks. Julia Baird’s “Phosphorescence” and this one, “Any Ordinary Day” by Leigh Sales. Quite different approaches, but equally lovely and insightful.

Sales is more journalistic than literary. She follows her journalistic instincts to tell stories of people who encounter loss on a day that is otherwise ordinary. She compliments these compelling and moving stories with research that frames our show more responses to grief in helpful theory. We get both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. Readable, sad, uplifting and hopeful. Highly recommended. show less