[X] My Assistant

[Burmese]

Does anyone have a list of dates for Steve Squyers book signing appearances (as mentioned in his latest MER update)?

[Harder]

Yesterday I made an enquiry at Kinokuniya bookshop in Singapore and they quoted 4 to 6 weeks . Normally they have everything. I suggest Steve makes a stopover there as well, speeds up the printing & distribution of the book , or both.

[dvandorn]

While I found Singapore to be a beautiful city, at the moment I'm glad to be in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA -- where I just picked up a copy of Roving Mars yesterday, at a Barnes & Noble bookstore.

It's very, very well-written -- you can very clearly hear Squyres' voice in it. And his enthusiasm. He also doesn't hide his darker side, which comes out a bit in that pair of PBS documentaries, as well. For instance, he speaks of JPL colleagues working on an opposing bid for the 2001 lander mission as "the opposition," with whom he shunned contact during the bidding process. "We can be friends later" is how he puts it, talking about avoiding them and even refusing to speak to them as he passed them on the walkways of the JPL campus.

But it is a very, very well-written chronicle of the process of creating and flying robotic Mars explorers. I'm sure we'll all own a copy in the near future...

-the other Doug