Grunch of Giants [Paperback]

Buckminster Fuller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2004

This five-hour long recording is a passionate summary of Bucky's ideas. He reviews his assesment of humanity's most pressing problems, global strategies for solving these problems, and the conclusions from his "56-year experiment."

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Buckminster Fuller has had a profound influence on our modern society as the godfather of environmental and ecological awareness and practice. A philosopher, inventor, and one of the boldest innovators of the 20th century, he is known as the designer of the Dymaxion House, Car, and Map, the Geodesic Dome, and the World Game. As a mathematician he is recognized as the discoverer of Synergetics, and it was he who coined the term Spaceship Earth. He is the author of over two dozen books.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Book Publishing Company (TN) (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974060518
• ISBN-13: 978-0974060514
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 4.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #385,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still timely, twenty plus years later, April 25, 2005

By 

K. T Urner (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grunch of Giants (Hardcover)

People got impatient with Fuller because he kept throwing out a timeline which went something like this: if we work like crazy for the next 10 years, we might solve some of the major problems we've always put up with, e.g. death by starvation to take a big one.

Then another decade goes by, and a lot more people starve, and people shake their heads thinking "Bucky, Bucky... he just didn't have a clue, did he?" Well, I say he most certainly did. Not his problem or fault that we never staged his "design science decade" with such concerted effort and focus. And the potential to improve our collective lot aboard Spaceship Earth is still real.

What's fun about 'Grunch of Giants' is it marks the end of a long trajectory, where the 'real Bucky' finally hits the water, after the decades-long arc of a canon ball. He makes a big splash, and sets up a lot of ripple effects, many of which we're feeling to this day.

The main thing is he reawakens threads around the issue of corporate personhood, questioning how LLCs got to be "persons" in the eyes of the law. Decades later, Thom Hartmann starts to uncover some answers in 'Unequal Protection' which deserves to show up as a kind of sequel to 'GofG' on many levels.

Countering a soulless march to oblivion, an automatic pilot response to a desperate situation, were heroics, integrity, and the more agile networks. Readers may spontaneously think of the Internet (still in its infancy when this book came out -- no web to speak of), but I also think of networks like CBS, a corporation to be sure, but with a lot of life in it (not soulless).

Bucky was aware of his image through the years, how people saw him. He started out as a kind of benign Buck Rogers, one of those mad inventors coming up with wacky futuristic designs, and making comforting noises about utopian possibilities. But in the meantime the Cold War had gotten going in earnest, followed by a backlash in the 1960s and 1970s, with a new generation finding that Sword of Damocles (the ongoing prospect of immanent nuclear holocaust) entirely unacceptable. The USA became radicalized, as Colby confronted Congress with crazy-making testimony regarding Vietnam, as John Kerry squared off against the Westmoreland types, as colleges projected 'Hearts and Minds' to shocked audiences (1974). Fuller kept going, incorporating all these developments, and coming back with 'Critical Path'. Plus he floated World Game. Increasingly, he had to be taken seriously, less as a harmless crackpot entertainer (like the guy in the 'Six Flags' ad campaign), and more as a serious revolutionary thinker, with difficult-to-sort-out ties to the CIA (E.J. Applewhite, his lead collaborator on 'Synergetics' was an associate of Helms, another Yale grad, and former Deputy Inspector General of the agency -- as the back of the paperback edition of 'Synergetics' made sure we knew).

Indeed, the CIA figures prominently in GofG, which is part of what sets it apart as more "realistic" than some of his earlier poetry. Stocks and bonds, treasury bills, prominent figures of the day mentioned by name -- it seemed like Bucky was finally intersecting our special case reality, at some odd angle, true, but that just added to the uncanny feel of the book. Plus it's very literary, alluding to Orlando Furiouso, which in turn links to Orlando, Florida and the giant BuckyBall at EPCOT: Spaceship Earth. To top it all off, around the same time this book was declaring the USA we have known "bankrupt and extinct," Reagan and company decide this'd be the right time to give Fuller a Medal of Freedom. Shortly after, Fuller dies. 'Cosmography' was posthumous.

This is Bucky at the top of his game in my opinion, a great work of literature. I'm surprised it's not on more college syllabi, as it's quite short and readable, yet opens onto a huge number of threads both into history and mythology. Mythology is about both the very distant past and the very distant future (Fuller thought they sort of came together, given his eternally regenerative universe model), and 'Grunch of Giants', like 'Synergetics' itself, is very definitely a major work in the humanities. Five stars for Bucky.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read - over and over, February 25, 2009

By 

D. Llanos (Trini-land) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grunch of Giants (Perfect Paperback)

This book is definitely vital for understanding the history and growth of the world as we know it... it raises many questions and makes you really think about what you are doing and whether it is for better or for worse of our earth. Intense read and needs to be read more than once because there is just so much to learn.

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bucky expounds, December 21, 2004

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grunch of Giants (Paperback)

If you've never read Buckminster Fuller's writings, you've missed out on one of the most remarkable minds of the 20th century. Yes, he invented the geodesic dome and laid out the principles for some kinds of tensile structures. He was also a tireless inventor. He did not necessarily create something fundamentally new each time, but always sought out more value for the dollar and pound of resources, and always measured that value in quality of human life. Except for the dome, his developments are often paraded and quixotic oddities, stripped of Fuller's real intent. This brief book lays out his philosophy for human welfare in terms of national and trans-national economics.

His thinking is clear and gentle - human happiness always comes first. It comes across in a whirwind of ideas, racing across the page faster than words can keep up. It's not rare to see a sentence start with economics and finish with stellar thermodynamics. You'll also sentences wildly stretched to hold just one of his ideas in complete form. Two consecutive sentences stretch from page 8 to 12! Even English words are too small to hold the atoms his ideas, so he creates the most startling hypenated word-collages. For example, in discussing how tools grew out of and extend the body, he writes:

"Nests and eggs are indeed tools, as is the womb -
an only-once-in-a-while, carried-within-mammalian,
new-life-production tool."

Social criticism, economics based in the physical world, tempered technological optimism, and a wonderful heart - they're all here, wrapped in a unique package of words. Whether or not you agree with his "economics of wealth", as opposed to "economics of scarcity," it's a remarkable view of human society.

//wiredweird