Join Bart’s Books for an evening with Stewart Lawrence Sinclair on Saturday, April 13 from 6-7! RAINY DAY VENUE CHANGE TO KIM MAXWELL STUDIO, 226 W OJAI AVE, NEXT TO JIM AND ROBS

From the author Juggling, Sinclair’s Space Rover is a brief book that brings a keen eye and a skillful voice to the rich cultural history of mechanical wanderers.

In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit and vision many equated with the space race.

Fifty years later, that vision feels like a nostalgic fantasy, but the lunar rover's legacy paved the way for Mars rovers like Sojourner, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Other rovers have made accessible the world's deepest caves and most remote tundra, extending our exploratory range without risking lives. Still others have been utilized for search and rescue missions or in clean up operations after disasters such as Chernobyl.

For all these achievements, rovers embody not just our potential, but our limits. Examining rovers as they wander our terrestrial and celestial boundaries, we might better comprehend our place, and fate, in this universe.

As meandering and revelatory as its subject, Stewart Lawrence Sinclair's Space Rover takes us on a trip through space and time that's full of universal and personal discovery. Rovers are our mechanical avatars and assistants in hostile environments, but they are also, in their own way, our friends and family.”
—Fred Scharmen, Program Director and Associate Professor of Architecture, Morgan State University

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair is a writer and journalist based in New York. He has been published in Guernica Magazine, Literary Hub, 3:AM Magazine, The Millions, Avidly: A Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Orleans Review, among others. He is the author of Juggling (2023) and is originally from Ventura, California.