"Critical Path" by Fuller & Kuromiya

Essential Bucky for the serious student. "Critical Path is a state-of-the-art summary of human evolution." — Marilyn Fergusen, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy.

The masterwork of a brilliant career, and an important document for 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 prehisory, through the development of the great political empires, to the vast international corporate and political systems that control our destiny today to shoe 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.

Over the course of the eighty-eight years of his lifetime, R. Buckminster Fuller became perhaps the best known American thinker of the twentieth century. Sometimes called "the planet's friendly genius," Bucky had gained renown as an inventor and designer (of the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion car, the Dymaxion map), the creator of the Geodesic dome, the man who coined the term "Spaceship Earth" and organized the World Game, the mathematician who discovered Synergetics, and as a dogged individualist whose genius has been felt throughout the world for over half a century.