Customer Reviews

The Symbiotic Man: A New Understanding of the Organization of Life and a Vision of the Future

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4 star:		(1)
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With the metaphor of the Cybion, central concept of the Symbiotic Man, Joel de Rosnay has jumped a new step since the Macroscope. The first part of the book will delight a reader who likes imagination and vision. This part describes a lot of conceptual ideas and requires a serious attention when reading it. On the other hand, the second and third parts are more practical with many political, economic and social examples and graphics illustrating the ideas of the first part. One of the characteristic of the book is the possibility to open the book at any page and extract relevant information. This book would be particularly suited to be published on the Internet in order to navigate between main ideas and examples ! Before reading this book, I had a very imprecise idea of chaos, rigidity, fractal evolution, order, complexity. No I understand these notions when applied to organisations and society.

Joël De Rosnay's book is a gold mine of provocative ideas about the evolution of mankind, economics, politics and more. It pulls together information from organic chemistry, computer technology, chaos theory and a slew of unrelated fields to argue for a less egocentric approach to business and government. In the process, it redefines competitiveness and industry. This eloquent presentation is definitely not a light read. It is mind-boggling in scope but fractal in delivery - which means you can delve into virtually any section and get a feel for its message. Business wisdom is spotty here, but this is not a business book. Instead, it's more of a cross between Wired magazine and an intricately researched science fiction novel. It is not for the faint of heart (or brain), but we [...] recommend it, if you'd like to stimulate your mind, shake up your old beliefs, check the inventiveness of bold technological projections, or glimpse an exciting future.

I could not disagree more with Ben's review. My experience was the opposite. I've read widely in the realms of science, technology, and the future, and found this book to be one of the best and most important I've ever read. Over the last 9 years I've gifted more than two dozen people with it. Everyone who read it love it and agreed with my assessment of its significance. And amazingly, even though it was written a decade ago, very little of it is out of date.

I cannot recommend this book too highly.

~ Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World, which has been endorsed by 6 Nobel Prize-winning scientists and by religious leaders across the political and theological spectrum

I was really excited to find this book and read it as I have explored these theories for many years now. However, there is nothing new here. You can read a hundred pages and walk away having felt uninspired, unimpressed and no smarter than when you began. I kept hoping somewhere in this book I would find something that would make it worthwhile, but nothing. Very dissapointed.