The Girls from Ames:  A Story of  Women & a Forty~Year Friendship is an intimate look at the friendships of eleven women over a forty~year period.  Interspersed with studies that highlight the importance of the development and maintenance of close relationships in the health and well~being of women, The Girls from Ames is part sociology study, part biography and part cultural reference book.  The women came of age just at the tail end of the Baby Boom, so they are the immediate benefactors of the women’s rights movement and other social changes that marked the 60s, 70s and 80s. It was fun to read about the different hairstyles and clothes…