With the appearance of Grunch of Giants, R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory - his long-gestated myth-of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity. In fact, he has long argued that future historians of our era may subsume our business practices as a branch of mythology; thus it is not surprising that the word economic appears nowhere in his text. Fuller’s myth is no idle fairy tale, since he faces his question - the question of a technological imperative which only he could raise with the deadly seriousness of satire. That question is: Can our system of national political sovereignties and corporate profits survive the inevitable technology revolution required to obviate wars by effecting a worldwide rise in the standard of living. One of the functions of myth is to resolve contradictions in our culture. Grunch of Giants portrays the rising of multinational corporations in the paradoxical role of function both as the epitome of capitalistic selfishness and as the inadvertent vehicle for the dissolution of national political boundaries - the last deterrent to a one-world economy. The result is more subversive of the property and profit values of the capitalist system than anything dreamed of since Karl Marx. —E.J. Applewhite, collaborator with RBF on Synergetics and Synergetics 2, author of Cosmic Fishing: A Memoir of Working With R. Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller takes on the gigantic corporate megaliths that exert increasing control over every aspect of daily life. In the form of a modern allegory, he traces the evolution of these multinational giants from the post-World War II military-industrial complex to the current army of abstract legal entities known as the corporate world. GRUNCH stands for Gross Universal Cash Heist.

The masterwork of a brilliant career, and an important document of the crisis now facing mankind. Today we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of the human race. Technology has placed in our hands almost unlimited power at the very moment when we have run up against the limits of our resources aboard Spaceship Earth, as the crises of the late twentieth century—political, economic, environmental, and ethical—determine whether or not humanity survives. In this masterful summing up of an entire lifetime’s thought and concern, R. Buckminster Fuller addresses these crucial issues in his most significant, accessible, and urgent work. Critical Path traces the origins and evolution of humanity’s social, political, and economic systems from the obscure mists of prehistory, through the development of the great political empires, to the vast international corporate and political systems that control our destiny today to show how we got to our present situation and what options are available to man. With his customary brilliance, extraordinary energy, and unlimited devotion, Bucky Fuller shows how mankind can survive, and how each individual can respond to the unprecedented threat we face today. 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.

New edition of Buckminster Fuller’s first work published in 1938, which was promoted by Albert Einstein. In 43 chapters the constructor, visionary, inventor, designer, creator of language, and spectacular performer rolls out the art of independent thought. Fuller lays out an enormous horizon and Nine Chains to the Moon is equivalent to a navigation across the world we live in: "What Is a House?", "Death and Life", "Longing Crosses the Sea", "Dollarability", "We Call it Earth", "Stomach Rhythms", "Ephemeralization"—from the microscopic to the automobile, to the house, to urbanity, to the image of the cosmos in constant movement. The title, said Fuller, is meant to stimulate open thinking: the 1938 world population, one person on the shoulders of another, will reach from the earth to the moon nine times!

Synergetics, according to E. J. Applewhite, was Fuller's name for the geometry he advanced based on the patterns of energy that he saw in nature. For Fuller, geometry was a laboratory science with the touch and feel of physical models--not rules out of a textbook. It gains its validity not from classic abstractions but from the results of individual physical experience. Description by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

A series of twenty-one original triangular lithographs (with narrative captions) which may be displayed in a helical scroll of linked tetrahedra. They were executed during the years 1975 and 1976 under the guiding light of Tatyana Grosman (to whom Fuller had been introduced by Edwin Schlossberg) at her ULAE print workshop in West Islip, Long Island. In something of a publishing innovation this trade book was brought out concurrently with a limited edition of the signed original lithographs. Michael Denneny was the editorial impresario at St. Martin's and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts handled the exhibition of the lithographs. Fuller composed the Tetrascroll between the publication of Synergetics in 1975 and Synergetics 2 in 1979. He had been frustrated by the rigid structure of the synergetics books which, despite certain advantages, he felt robbed the work of spontaneity and narrative force. To compensate for this Fuller worked feverishly on the Tetrascroll as a free-form obbligato to the synergetics books. He explained to me at the time, "The empirical, the scientific way to present the argument of synergetics is the way I am doing it in Goldilocks. Description by Ed Applewhite, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller