Rounded up 3.75 stars, because she's Worth It.

"One of the guides brought up a big worm. It weighed a third of a pound and looked like a weird tube. I could only begin to imagine the size of the fish you could catch with it. Bruce made me lick it. He said it excreted a horrible-tasting substance that kept it protected from predators, and he was so right. But it seemed like a good idea at the time." (p. 187)



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.

We begin with the requisite childhood stories of growing up with her mother, aunt and grandmother; all Cuban immigrants who fled during Castro's rise to power with only the clothes on their backs. Her first trip to Guyana as a naive college student saw her more concerned with carry-on weight than realistic packing, but it was there that she was bitten by the travel bug. Not to mention some other, grosser bug that made her hands swell up like basketballs. This trip led to others and then a position with National Geographic, getting paid to do the things she loved best, all over the world. Mayor's writing tone is very conversational and engaging; it makes me wonder if her scientific papers would be more palatable than other exceptionally dry ones that I have read in the past.

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.)

This reminds me of a story that Sandi Toksvig once told:

Years ago, when I was studying anthropology at university, one of my female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with 28 markings on it. "This," she said, "is alleged to be man's first attempt at a calendar." We all looked at the bone in admiration. "Tell me," she continued, "What man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar."

Mayor's ruminations on this were my favorite portion of the memoir (even though the descriptions of constant jungle hiking and dirty camping were both impressive and disgusting in turn). After all, this idea came to her because she "[grew] up with three mothers." Why wouldn't other researchers be similarly biased/with a separate perspective? As much as a scientist attempts to be objective, they are only human and susceptible to human foibles.