Mireya Mayor went from cheering on the sidelines for the Miami Dolphins to cutting through rainforest with a machete as a National Geographic explorer and primatologist. The book's whole pitch is in that sentence, and it is what made me pick it up. The title does most of the work. Pink Boots and a Machete. Femininity and a blade, carried at the same time by the same person, and she did not see a reason to choose.

The memoir moves between two lives that do not usually sit on one resume. She was an NFL cheerleader. Then she found science late, fell hard for the study of primates, and ended up in the field tracking lemurs in Madagascar, getting charged by a gorilla in the Congo, sleeping wherever the work put her. She co-discovered one of the smallest primates in the world, a mouse lemur, and the book gives you what that actually involves, the mud, the illness, the equipment that fails, and the kind of fear that does not make it into movies.

(Buy on Amazon)

What I liked is that she does not flatten herself to fit the explorer role. She kept the parts of her that did not match the stereotype of a field scientist, and she is funny about the gap between how she looks and what she does. The writing is plain and quick. She does not reach for big statements about nature. She tells you what happened, and what happened is usually the more interesting thing.

What stuck with me is that she never chose. Mayor did not decide the cheerleader and the scientist were two different people, one of whom had to be left behind, she carried both, and for me that is the real subject under the adventure stories. You can come from one place and end up somewhere that has nothing to do with it, and you do not have to apologize for the road that got you there.

It reads fast, lighter than I expected for the subject, and that is mostly a strength. A few chapters skim past episodes I wanted more time inside, and now and then the tone stays upbeat when the situation was clearly grim. I would rather that than a memoir that milks its hardship.

If fieldwork or conservation interests you, or just the sight of someone changing direction completely and making it stick, this one is worth your time. I closed it wanting to know what she did next.

Buy Pink Boots and a Machete on Amazon

Journey & Adventure

The same road out of comfort shows up in one of my own freewriting pages.

Handwriting as Meditation: Sourcing Creativity Through Flow, Breath, and Rhythm - On traveling out of comfort zones and discovering what it means to be human

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