Well written balanced look at Fuller and his creations. He was a real inspiration to me when I learned about him in the early 70's through the Whole Earth Catalog. Keats takes a look at his many successes as well as his failures and brings many ideas up to date . ( )

You Belong to the Universe by Jonathon Keats is an interesting overview of Buckminster Fuller. I am somewhat hesitant to call it a biography since it is less about telling his life's story than it is about discussing Fuller's strengths and weaknesses as they were then and what they might say about our future. But, yeah, it is still basically a biographical type of book so...

This is a fairly balanced assessment of Fuller, which can be a difficult achievement to accomplish. It is easy to either overly admire the legend or overly criticize the self-promoter, but Keats manages a nice middle ground of justifiable criticism and acknowledgement that shows a bit more of who the man was. I will admit I am not an admirer of Fuller, which isn't to say I don't acknowledge some of his insights, I just find inflexible people less admirable. That said, this book gave me a better understanding of the man and why he had some of his idiosyncrasies.

I would recommend this for anyone interested in this man who in so many ways represents his era as well as anyone.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

Outstanding Critical Biography

Buckminster Fuller would have approved of the structure of You Belong To The Universe. It dispenses with his biography in the introduction, delineating the various myths that Fuller himself propagated. It’s the standard hagiography that everyone who is interested already knows. Keats devotes the rest of the book to putting Fuller’s ideas into perspective and criticizing many of his concepts with real world applications and criticisms. It is a wonderful approach, smartly executed, and immensely enlightening.

From cars to shelter, Keats examines Fuller’s dreams and shows how they have been realized (or bypassed) today, differently, and often in more sophisticated fashion, thanks to new materials, 3D printers and new inspiration. At some level, Fuller was little more than a dreamer, predicting a Jetsons-like future, because he had no way to execute. Keats calls him a techno-utopian. This sort of “comprehensive anticipatory design science” is fully realized only if the scientist thinks through the details: the materials, the stresses, and the environment. Fuller did not do that. He just proselytized his ideas in talks all over the world, for decades, without debate, according to Keats.

Keats takes each of Fuller’s major themes and shows their pre-history, where Fuller was right and was wrong, and how developments soon left him behind. These include the Dymaxion car, home, and map, geodesic domes, world peace games and distance learning, each of which gets a chapter.

Despite contradicting himself and changing course as needed, Fuller remained so convinced of his rightness that alternatives were meaningless to him. This cleareyed view of a futurist saint is a valuable eye-opener, providing much needed light where only heat has been apparent.

David Wineberg ( )