R. Buckminster FullerReviews

Oh, if only we had listened to Fuller. We wouldn't be in such a mess now.

This may have been cool in its day, but it comes across today as noisey, over-designed and confusing.
This book is snippets of quotes and images laid out in a "clever" design that you have to read front to back and back to front.
I think the design is a reflection of the times, the confused sixties and seventies when technology and social change were changing faster than society could keep up. Today, I think the layout just adds noise to the message.
Also, there is not much of R. Buckminster Fuller even though he is listed as the primary author.
Perhaps in context I would understand more of the humor and irony of this book, but today it is more of a curious artifact of the time when it was published.

Five stars for what this book is, a short explanation of the philosophy of technical optimism of R. Buckminster Fuller.
However, Fuller writes in a dense style that is sometimes hard to read.
By the way, this is not an operating manual at all, it focuses more on concepts rather than tactics. Spoiler alert - the key is that we work together and stop creating false differences between people (nations, rich and poor, races).

A quirky thrift store find that regularly sells for $200 a various booksellers. Nice copy, in tight condition, the title page says it all "The Most Important fact about Spaceship earth: An Instruction book didn't come with it."

This book is a time capsule that helps us see our intellectual progress since it was published. Actually, it is almost useless. Back then we thought it was great stuff, but only because almost everything else was even worse. One might get excited over the fact that there is a chapter titled General Systems Theory. Actually the chapter is so vague it is almost useless.½

This text presents Fuller's speculative philosophy of history, in a somewhat piecemeal fashion of various talks. fuller has an unusual background of both social and technical expertise. His perspective is menat to be stimulating

The name R. Buckminster Fuller brings up images of geodesic domes for most people. I found a paperback 1973 printing of the 1969 book with a properly psychedelic deconstructed sphere/face on the cover. Only after reading the book did I find out we already had a copy (much newer edition) without the cool cover. Fuller's premise is that the earth, like a spaceship, needs to have all its systems working as one, that there has to be a balance between resources and their use. He carries the metaphor through various scientific explanations (most of which were beyond my knowledge) to show why our lives depend on the maintenance of our spaceship. A wonderful premise and metaphor -- seems really a propos as we look at climate change becoming irreversible by 2030. It's also scary that in the time since this was written not many have paid heed.

Overall, not bad...great to get inside this guy's mind for a bit..love how he came to the logical conclusion that because he had a failed business where he lost his friends' / investors' money he should dedicate his life to the service of humanity (i'm paraphrasing).

Bucky Fuller, as his fans affectionately call him, sat at a fascinating intersection of techno-utopianism and permaculture (although it didn't go by that name yet). Today, these fields are diametric.

This is the last book Fuller wrote, published the year of his death. It's short, and a bit of a mosaic or hodgepodge, covering ancient history, mathematics, politics, business, and number of other issues. It is part-autobiographical. Fuller believed that we had achieved a level of technological development that we would be able to shift from weaponry over to "livingry" over the next 50 years, and that all humans would be able to be sufficiently provisioned. Although he's right in regard to the physical realities of our world, he seems to have underestimated the cultural and financial customs society is unwilling to forgo, meaning that we now have a record number of impoverished people.

In the book, Fuller claims that inflation is due solely to corporate collusion. I've never heard this accusation before (it generally being blamed on the federal reserve), and is likely worth further consideration. At the same time, it seems that he believed in investment, and was suggesting that Social Security be invested in corporate stocks.

A perfectly charming, cute, naive, cranky collage of jokes, clever insights, utopian plans, and futuristic predictions about technology and society. It's wacky enough that it doesn't need to take its message too seriously, but interesting enough to get you flipping pages. Unique.

This book was created from the transcript of Buckminster Fuller's presentation to the Southern Illinois University's planning committee in 1961, after being invited as part of a group of experienced professionals called on as consultants for future development of the university.

Reading anything by Fuller can be a heady, almost trippy experience; Fuller was an inventor and innovator whose work was always immersed in his unyielding optimism for mankind's potential and future evolution, and any project undertaken by him always pointed towards this Utopian inevitability. Education Automation is no different, as it's main focus is on Fuller's wide-eyed predictions of how education would eventually become the country's (and world's) foremost business venture, with fully-funded advanced (and even lifetime) education to fulfill society's needs as the global labor-based economy gives way to a idea-based economy.

It's easy enough to dismiss some of Fuller's predictions and theories as wishful thinking or delusional prognostication, if for no other reason than the real world's inability - or unwillingness - to follow the trail laid out by him. However, his prescient ability to lay out an archaic version of today's internet, and accurately describe mankind's evolutionary path to the present (complete with historically accurate examples) that leads him to believe in the brightness of it's future, are strokes of genius that cannot be ignored, even if they do feel as if seen through rose-colored glasses.

If you are new to Buckminster Fuller, this is a great introduction to the man's thought process and vision, although even in this slim volume his explanations can be occasionally dense and convoluted. Be prepared to be more depressed than inspired, however, as comparing his hopeful vision of yesterday's tomorrow still bares little resemblance to the unflinching reality of today.

The title of Buckminster Fuller's classic late-life book Critical Path is inspired by the Apollo Project. Bucky estimated that in order for Apollo 11 to successfully launch, land on the moon, and return to Earth, the engineers had to follow a "critical path" of approximately 2,000,000 tasks that had to be completed in correct sequence. Bucky felt that humanity has its own "critical path" program that must be followed to avoid war, and to create a peaceful and sustainable existence on Spaceship Earth.

I'm a huge Bucky Fuller fan, and feel that Critical Path is probably his capstone, career-summing book.

However, it is far from a perfect book.

Let's do a "pros and cons" analysis of Critical Path:

Pros
• Bucky does a good job of making himself accessible to a wide audience. The sentences are short and readable. Anyone who complains about "indecipherable" writing has clearly not tried reading his unforgiving tome Synergetics.
• At age 85, Bucky seems to know he is near the end of his life. He does his best to summarise his life's achievements, and to leave a blueprint for future generations to follow.
• Bucky is an imaginative thinker, regularly adding his deft reversals of conventional logic ("wind doesn't blow, it sucks"; advocating that "upstairs" and "downstairs" be replaced with the more planet-centrically accurate "outstairs" and "instairs")
• It is inspiring to read Chapter 4, where Bucky personally reflects on his decision to transform his life as a 33 year old. Instead of suicide, he decided to eschew traditional employment, and focus on improving the well-being of all of humanity. His in an inspirational story, and it is great to read his deliberately-planned work methods.

Cons:
• Quite simply, there is a lot of good material in the book. But it really needed an editor. For example, Bucky includes verbatim a 30-page report to the Brazilian government about how to industrialise their economy. It is unclear what relevance this 1943 (mid-World War II) report had to readers in 1981. In 2015, this section had almost zero resonance with me.

• After an inspiring 'introduction' section, Bucky's first chapter is quite embarrassing. It is titled "Speculative Prehistory of Humanity", and indeed there is an abundance of speculation included.
• For example, Bucky claims that humans were teleported to Earth from a galactic headquarters. And that instead of humans evolving from primates, the other primates de-evolved from us. Bucky even claims that porpoises and whales evolved from Polynesians with large lungs.
• Many Bucky-fans seem to gloss-over these wild theories by simply not mentioning them; I think it is important to hold your heroes to account.
• Quite simply, Bucky's claims about evolution are in contraction to all known evidence, and his flimsy "arguments" are easily demolished. Luckily they are not central to his main arguments about technology and innovation.

• Bucky gets very carried away by his futuristic visions of a high-tech society. Chapter 8, in particular has aged badly in the 30+ years since it was written. Bucky claims that we should close all schools, and that children given free access to TV and computers. Given these tools, the kids will spontaneously choose to educate themselves to standards unachievable through human teachers. Bucky also describes the lives of leisure we will live in an automated world with few necessary "jobs". I wonder if Bucky imagined all the necessary new jobs that would be created by such a transformation to a leisure-culture (e.g. chefs, waiters, delivery drivers, etc). Anyway, it hasn't happened.

In summary, I really like Buckminster Fuller, and I like Critical Path. But I rate it overall as a 3.5 star mixed-bag.

My recommendation is to dip your toe in the water with books about Bucky, before reading his own books. My recommended starting-point is Buckminster Fuller's Universe (1989), which remains the best book I have read about Bucky. If you like that one, read New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller, and then snake your way towards Critical Path.½

In short: only read Synergetics after reading an 'interpretation' of Bucky's ideas by other writers.

Synergetics is a book that is impossible to rate with a star-rating. So I won't.

This is a an 800 page condensation of Buckminster Fuller's 50-year investigations into geometry, mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. It is formatted like a textbook, with every paragraph assigned a categorisation number ("524.101", "524.11", etc).

The fact that the book is almost exclusively about physics and metaphysics makes it harder for the layperson to understand than some of Bucky's other books. By contrast, his other books are about his more practical, everyday-life inventions and philosophies. Be warned!

Bucky does little to extend an olive branch to his readers. His text is heavy with his unusual jargon, as well as paragraph-length sentences. By his own account, Bucky preferred to be not understood than misunderstood. Therefore, he would rather you re-read a sentence out of sheer necessity, rather than skim through and misunderstand his points.

Despite reading horror stories of the book being utterly incomprehensible, I managed to get a good sense of what Bucky describes in Synergetics. I achieved this mostly by forcing myself to focus on the words, rather than relying on Bucky to pave an easy path. Having a reasonable understanding of high school Physics also helped.

The other reason why I was able to understand the book is because I had read a 'plain-English primer' of Bucky's ideas via the great biography Buckminster Fuller's Universe (1989), which remains the best book I have read about Bucky. This is the approach I recommend for other readers, in conjunction with the books A Fuller Explanation by Amy C. Edmondson and Bucky: a guided tour of Buckminster Fuller by Hugh Kenner.

Not being a mathematician, I am unable to verify the worthiness of the concepts described within this book. Bucky claims that it all fits within the parameters of conventional mathematics, though he emphasises a 60°, triangle-based coordinate system, rather than a 90°, square-based coordinate system. This flows into his philosophical conception of 'the geometry of thought', as described in the book.

By now you've already decided whether you want to read this book or not. For most people, reading books about Bucky will suffice. Others will be drawn to the magnetic allure of Synergetics through its reputation. As mentioned, I recommend reading only after being pre-primed by other writers' interpretations!

Side note: I was a little alarmed with how easily Bucky dismisses the concept of evolution. If he really disputes the Darwinian concept of simple organisms evolving into complex organisms, he really should have devoted more than a flimsy one-page dismissal to the topic. His arguments are easily demolished. I presume this oversight does not cloud the validity of the rest of his book...

This is a classic, published in 1969, first read by me back in 1970 or 1971, when we thought we would soon experience either the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius or, alternately, the Eve of Destruction. Definitely Utopian, still visionary, and in some ways quite wrong, Fuller makes interesting reading even now, 40 years later and 26 years after his death in 1983. One important area in which Fuller has turned out to have been wrong was his prediction that global population would stabilize at the then current 4 billion thanks to world-wide industrialization, which he expected to be complete by 1985. Now almost 7 billion, world population has nearly doubled since he wrote this book and has not yet even peaked.
Another issue that Fuller wasn’t exactly wrong about, but that he didn’t take fully into account, is that of waste; for example, what to do with all the plastic, such as the Texas-sized mat now floating out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or nuclear waste (though it must be said that he categorized atoms similarly to fossil fuels as non-renewable capital, to be used only sparingly and then only for start-up purposes). He doesn’t mention climate change or global warming except by implication (i.e., if we don’t smarten up soon, we will use up or destroy our life support and enhancement system on this planet). However, Fuller placed great faith in human evolution proceeding in such a way as to result in a favorable outcome for humans on this planet. What has saved us in the past, he said, is our built-in (by evolution) trial and error approach in conjunction with a bank account of energy resources. Meaning, we have evolved in such a way as to enjoy enough breathing space to be able to make errors and then adjust our behavior accordingly and progress.
Some of his prognostications seem uncannily prescient considering the world's current economic crises, for example :
"The constantly put-off or undermet costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him," and "The wisest humans recognized in 1810 only one three-hundredth of 1 per cent of the immediately thereafter 'proven value' of the United States’ share of the world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest of men of the times would have seen little they could afford to do."
R. Buckminster Fuller is still well worth reading, if only to ponder his definitions of democracy and wealth:
"Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgment what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. . . . .
Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”

What, forty-four years on, is the future of Spaceship Earth? Ol' Bucky does, to his credit, grasp some essential truths about our environmental position. We have limited resources, we consume too much too fast, and we have no organized means of managing them for our future survival. Hence something must be done. This idea rightfully endures.

I must, however, disagree with his future characterization of the earth as a spaceship - that would imply some military hierarchy, international cooperative order, strict roles and assigned positions. With the present international situation, I suspect that those wealthy ones among us live in cruise ships, and some hundred millions of others are living on the giant plastic garbage island in the Pacific, lashed to our pleasure flotilla and shoveling coal into the boilers.

What else does he offer us, besides this memorable, if flawed, image? Some woolly historicism about Great Pirates who control information. Some Alex Jones stuff about banks. Some strange attempts at metaphysics. The idea of a system being greater than the sum of its parts, coining that hideous cliche of inarticulate business majors everywhere, "synergy". Something about specialization, baby chickens, general systems theory, and so on and so on. Idyllic plans for attempting to rewrite human nature. You start to wonder if he's lost it.

I end with Fuller's closing words:

"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe."

This is supposed to be a final call to action. Fuller may have been a good scientist, creative engineer and a designer, but a manifesto-writer and coherent futurist he is not.

I would second the "delightful little book"designation. This book can be read upside down and right side up,.Not many books can get me to read them front to back right side up, back to front upside down twice.
Lots of quotes, factoids, pictures and other interesting stuff. Dated, but still very interesting as would befit a book by Buckminster Fuller, who among other things, invented the Geodesic Dome.

Great book. I read the early version back in the '70s and R. Buckminster Fuller was a genius. He was way before his time with how learning should be done. We need to institute his methods now with the technology we have today. This is a great book in support of homeschooling and private schools and innovation in my opinion. R. Buckminster Fuller is considered a genius by many.

R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, philosopher, mathematician, and dogged individualist. Perhaps best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term Spaceship Earth, his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought. Critical Path is Fuller's master work--the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern--as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation—at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises. The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.

An excellent collection of photos that cannot be found in any other publication. You might notice that my copy is autographed by RBF - I waited backstage at the Boulder Conference on World Affairs and sadly this was the only book I had with me-but Bucky gladly signed it after talking for over two hours continuously (never sitting down) while he was in his 80's.

I've started this one and got bogged down in the thick, thick language. On re-reading, must remember to keep paper and pencil handy so as to "connect the dots", especially in the essay "Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage" with all its geometrically arranged sub-sub-subtopics.

Gehört eigentlich zur Pflichtlektüre jedes Menschen. Das Buch eröffnet die Welt des eigenen Geistes und zeigt den Weg, wie wir Menschen die offensichtlichen Probleme, durch unser eigenes Handeln hervorgerufen, lösen können.
Einfach ein geniales Buch.

I was drawn to this book by its wonderful title and the recognition that I’d collected a number of quotations by its author without really knowing anything about him.

I found this book to be something of a curate’s egg. In places it uses language to develop ideas in a really clear way. In other parts the language and structure of the description seems to make the ideas rather impenetrable. On balance, however, the ideas win through.

(Having found out a little more about R. Buckminster Fuller I have learned both that this is one of his more accessible volumes, and that his other books may well be worth the challenge.)

It is a book with some wonderful ideas, not least the one captured in the title, that the Earth is a spaceship travelling through space escorted by the Moon and following its mother ship, the Sun. Though written in the 1970 this metaphor, or perhaps its simply a realisation, provides a framework which encompasses many of the problems of sustainable living we are currently grappling with.

Equally the book has some very vivid and enlightening imagery with which to entice the reader to see and begin to challenge their current paradigm. It for example begins with a story of Global Pirates which is used to describe the recent history of western civilisation, its creation of empires and the division of the world into those that have and those that have not. In a dozen pages or so it describes our current paradigm for how the world works and some of the key characteristics of our environment and the thinking this has created.

For example our understanding of need and scarcity, the role of nationality, the use of knowledge. I found the description very thought provoking and began questioning many of the assumptions that drive my, and possibly our current behaviour. He outlined the assumptions that there will always be shortages of resources and food, which underpin a view of haves’ and have-not’s and our need to protect what we have, often at much greater cost than sharing what we have.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a fellow speaker Mr. N Ramanathan (Ram) in Iran last year. He asked me
“When you have an idea. Who does it belong to?”
He didn’t expect an answer, nor do I have one, but what is clear is that it doesn’t belong to me It’s the result of a million connections and so must in some way belong to all of them.

This is a thought provoking book, which though in parts challenging, is concise enough to warrant some re-reading. The ideas may shake your understanding and beliefs, which may be one of the most powerful ways of enabling change.

A delightful little book about living in the 1970's, when TV and radio and airplanes had transformed the world into something entirely different from what it was not all that many years before.

Somewhat dated in images and concepts, and probably worthwhile for someone to do it again for the internet age. It's even harder to think of oneself as a noun, let alone a proper noun, with all this stuff going on that we seem to be totally flowing through sometimes without any control.

Quite the book. It's Fuller's attempt to convince humanity of the importance of fundamental change. Fuller's ideas are solid and practical, but perhaps a bit too rational and weird for mainstream adoption. I just don't see widespread use of geodesic domes in the next hundred years or so.

Still, I'm very glad I read it; his history of the events surrounding the two World Wars uncovered many surprises. I do like his view that rapidly improving technology allows us to do more with less, invalidating the old idea that we're going to run out of resources eventually. (For example, there's enough metal in the scrapyards to completely replace many existing new metal needs.)

Greatest companion math book every written.