Pink Boots and A Machete: My Journey from NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer

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The writing was therefore better than expected, though not great. It's conversational, but so much is left out! As other Goodreads reviewers have noted, she starts a story, gets to the climax, and then ends it. The example someone else has given of hanging off a mountainside and noticing that her rope was fraying, and then suddenly she's at the top of the mountain, is typical.

Mayor has a theory about gorilla social hierarchy that is somewhat unorthodox, based on past scientific observation: "... the prevailing thought has been that female gorillas are, without question, the weaker sex, forced to play by the rules. At least, that is what researchers had been reporting for decades, However, most of those researchers were male." Mayor posits that perhaps it is the females who actually have the power. Why would this not have merit? After all, how many researchers have defaulted to a male perspective without noticing, even the women? (I am referring here to the stereotypical male perspective, as I believe gender to be more of a spectrum.) Here's an excerpt from one: "the show can't decide whether to treat Mayor as an expert, or as the title and location hint, a bit of a sex symbol." He then added, "But throughout the show she wears a wool cap and drab clothes that just beg us to take her seriously." This was in contrast to the observation of another critic, who wrote, "Explorers require rugged gear, the sort Indiana Jones girds himself in. Then there's Mireya Mayor, a sexy blond explorer. She fills out a tank top nicely." I can't win. If I wear tank tops, I'm vying for attention. If I cover up, it's only because I want to be taken seriously. Regardless, the first critic lost all credibility when he called my clothes drab. They were both hip and designer. Mireya Mayor is a former NFL cheerleader turned NatGeo explorer - don't worry, if you didn't get it the first time, she repeats it many, many times throughout the course of this memoir. Mayor tries hard to justify both parts of her personality - the bug-loving little girl who grew up to be the Ph.D totin' explorer, but who is also still the cheerleader who loves being able to blow dry her hair. It makes me sad to think that she feels the need to defend it so constantly. It could certainly be the theme - there's threads of it woven into each chapter. The book itself even ends with a chapter of how she tries to juggle the life of a working mother - even if her work brings her away from her children much more so than most. During the anthropology course, Mayor says she found a new passion. So she headed straight to the field, signing up for a research trip to Guyana in South America. I was thrilled to receive a signed copy of this memoir by the author. The following is my honest review after reading the book.If there is one central theme of the book, it it this: that this sort of juxtaposition that many might find strange or odd - the mixture of the stereotypically feminine and the stereotypically masculine - is, well, not that strange or odd at all. But some of her fans might be surprised by what Mayor was up to before she trekked around remote regions of the world.

Mayor says it looked similar to known species of mouse lemur, but there was something different about the one she caught.And then there's the fact that the narrative itself is very choppy. Here's the near-death frayed rope experience as an example: Mireya Mayor is a primatologist, an explorer and the first female wildlife correspondent for the Ultimate Explorer series on National Geographic Channel.