Earthrise: the Apollo 8 photo that changed how humans view their planet, and also the title of a fascinating new book by Robert Poole, reviewed below.

Earthrise: How We First Saw Ourselves
By Robert Poole
Yale University Press

On Christmas Eve forty years ago, Frank Borman looked out the window and saw something no human had ever seen before. He saw the Earth rise.

At the time Borman was in a space capsule, with the first crew to orbit the Moon. They were on the dark side, in their fourth orbit of looking down at shades of gray on the lunar surface, set against the black of space. And then suddenly, the blue and white Earth dawned over the edge of the Moon. Apollo 8 astronauts Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders scrambled to take pictures through the small window with their hand-held cameras. Anders color photo became the iconic image dubbed “Earthrise,” splashed across magazine pages and posterized on classroom and dorm room walls all over the world.

Those who’ve grown up with this image (and the later full-Earth portraits) may not realize that “What does the Earth really look like?” was a mystery for thousands of years. We had photos of Mars long before a picture of our own planet. Philosophers, poets, visionaries and a few visionary scientists suggested how profound such an image might be, as Poole recounts.

Plato tried to imagine seeing the earth from high above, and envisioned a planet of bright colors. This fantasy viewpoint suggested philosophical conclusions: Romans like Cicero and Lucian pictured the puniness of earthly empires in the immensity of space, while Seneca saw the ridiculousness of “the boundaries set by mortals.” Medieval thinkers saw Earth as insignificant among greater planets (“Contrary to popular myth,” Poole writes, “the world was not widely believed in the Middle Ages to be flat…”), while 16th century artists emphasized the Earth’s grandeur. In more recent times, 1930s social reformer David Lasser thought the sight would end racial divisions, and in 1951 astronomer Fred Hoyle was among those who thought it would expose the futility of war and nationalism.

While universal peace and brotherhood did not immediately ensue when Earthrise became a spectacularly popular image, Poole believes it did have important impact. It contributed to the power of new metaphors, from Spaceship Earth to Gaia, which changed attitudes, however slow and subtly.

Yet NASA hadn’t given much priority to such a photo. “We had been trained to look at the Moon,” said Anders. “We hadn’t been trained to look at the Earth.”
But later it was that first view of Earthrise that these astronauts remembered most clearly: the Earth in the context of space, the whole Earth with all the visible color and life in one fragile body.

This fascinating little book packs a lot of provocative cultural history in 200 pages. It looks back before the Apollo missions and at how the Earthrise and subsequent photos of Earth from space fit into cultural changes, and may well have helped prompt and form them.

The Apollo program is itself worth remembering. Its spaceflights lasted a mere four years (1968 to 1972): 11 missions, nine voyages to the Moon and six moon landings. While Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon in Apollo 11 is best remembered, Apollo 8 was the most significant and the most awe-inspiring of the era. It was the first time a spacecraft left Earth orbit, traveled that far into space, and the first to orbit the Moon. It performed a number of complex technical achievements for the first time, requiring split-second timing: all with an on-board computer that was “tiny in comparison with modern pocket calculators.” The details of this mission are astounding, and full of amazing ironies.

For instance, it wasn't supposed to go to the Moon. Apollo 8 was scheduled to orbit the Earth and test aspects of the lunar lander, attached to the main spacecraft. Only the lander wasn't ready when Apollo 8 was--and there were rumors the Russians might be ready to orbit the Moon first. So Apollo 8 became a mission to orbit the Moon but not land. In a strange way, it was this fact that led to the Earthrise photo. If the lunar lander had been attached, the astronauts view of the Earthrise would have been blocked. They wouldn't have seen it, or photographed it.

Cultural history, especially in the popular press, has tended to be pretty cynical about Apollo and about President Kennedy, whose challenge to send astronauts to the Moon and return them before the 1960s ended was its impetus. It was all about the Cold War has become the conventional wisdom. But Poole rightly points out that there were always elements of the transcendent. "Kennedy's goal was not simply to beat the Russians, or even to appear to be racing them, "Poole writes, " but to do something spectacular to rise above it all." It was Apollo's success, Poole suggests, that led to international cooperation in space, and to the 1967 treaty that declared space off-limits to weaponry.

But for NASA, looking back at the Earth was mostly an afterthought--and the surprise was that it led to a lot of thought afterwards, beginning with the astronauts. Their view of their home planet remained the most persistent memory for many, and for some it was transformative. Gene Cernan, the last man to stand on the Moon, felt "My destiny was to be not only an explorer, but a messenger from outer space, an apostle for the future." Michael Collins returned determined "that I would do all I could to let people know what wonderful home we have—before it is too late." Edgar Mitchell thought about "beneath the blue and white atmosphere was a growing chaos...that population and conscienceless technology were growing rapidly way out of control."

The Earthrise photo had some of the same influence. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders later suggested that it caused people to "realize that we’re all jammed together on one really kind of dinky little planet, and we better treat it and ourselves better, or we’re not going to be here very long."

Poole fits Earthrise and the astronauts into the heady 60s and 70s, along with Bucky Fuller and Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog), the 80s of Carl Sagan and the Gaia theory of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Poole rightly reminds us that the Earthrise photo (and the “Blue Marble” whole Earth photo of 1972) gave visual support and impetus to holistic thinking and the ecology movement that blossomed in that period, leading to a certain credibility for some sense of Gaia: the planet as an interdependent organism. “The sight of the whole Earth, small, alive, and alone, caused scientific and philosophical thought to shift away from the assumption that the Earth was a fixed environment, unalterably given to humankind,” Poole concludes, “and towards a model of the Earth as an evolving environment, conditioned by life and alterable by human activity.”

That this was not Apollo’s purpose makes it all the more powerful. This book is (he writes) “the story of how the mightiest shot in the Cold War turned into the twentieth century’s ultimate utopian moment.”

Poole writes persuasively and mostly well. The only factual error I caught was attributing John XXXIII's landmark encyclical "Pacem in Terris" to another pope, and otherwise totally forgetting this most unforgettable leader of the early 60s.

Poole finds these space missions fascinating, but dismisses the possibility of finding other life out there. "Humankind now appears to be both the product and the custodian of the only island of intelligent life in the knowable universe," he writes. Whether that's true or not, his conclusions is apt: "Whether that vision has been timely enough, and powerful enough, for homo sapiens, the most successful of all invasive species, to reverse its own devouring impact on the Earth, will probably become apparent before too long."

After Apollo, no one has gone where no one had gone before , and NASA seems to be in a confused state. But the study of the Earth from space became one of their priorities in the 90s, and that's likely to continue in the Obama administration. While the new president is a Star Trek fan, he is also committed to addressing the Climate Crisis, and NASA is likely to be recruited for that mission.

Poole quotes Apollo astronaut Michael Collins as noting that as his space capsule turned, he looked both into space and back at Earth. “We saw both,” he told Congress, “and I think that is what our nation must do.”

The English Major: Jim Harrison's funny and poignant new novel.

The English Major
By Jim Harrison
Grove Press

Jim Harrison is known as a master of the novella—his most famous work is probably Legends of the Fall—but he’s also written what I regard as an American epic with the 800+ pages of the interlaced novels, Dalva and The Road Home. This new one is an ordinary-sized novel, a first person narration on the comic side. It’s got the eccentric sentences and preoccupations that Harrison fans will recognize: sex, food, memory, siblings, dogs, landscape and the road, but with one more added: age.

At the age of 60, Cliff is hanging on the edge of his old life, his last day on his farm in Michigan that his wife has sold for redevelopment, after divorcing him. Cliff jumps off and hits the road, immediately hooking up with a hot ex-student from his early teaching days, the fortysomething Maybelle. Good luck, he observes, is a mixed blessing. “Forty-five years of sex fantasies come true and I’m thinking I wish I could go fishing.” While Cliff takes in landscapes he’s never seen, Maybelle stares at her cell phone searching for a signal.

After Maybelle disembarks in Minnesota, Cliff passes through the North Coast of California from Oregon, on his way to visit his gay, show-business son in San Francisco. It’s in Eureka that at age 60 he sees the Pacific Ocean for the first time. “The Pacific Ocean was more than I bargained for. At first I thought I might have a heart attack…I spent the next day and a half between Eureka and San Francisco hugging the coast as closely as I could and stopping a couple of dozen times for yet another look. The ocean became the best smell of my life.”

As he approached Eureka, Cliff came up with the eccentric project that would eventually center him again: he would rename the 50 states and the birds of America. On the road he struggles to find the self that he’d left behind to become a serious farmer—the nimble-minded English major whose thoughts and feelings weren’t restricted to his fruit trees and birthing cows. Yet it’s clear from his alienation from the cell phone world, as well as his deep ties to the land and farm animals that he’s also being pulled back.

So will he change his life completely, perhaps devote himself to literary pursuits? Or will he reject change and revert? Well, there’s no either/or for Cliff, or in this gentle, funny novel that should entertain all readers, but inevitably will have particular meaning for those of Cliff’s age—and Jim Harrison’s.

For awhile, Harrison’s novels were structured as contrapuntal ruminations by at least a couple of characters, mostly when they're on the road. This novel has but one narrative voice, although the contrapuntal part is furnished by Cliff’s sudden memories versus what he’s actually going through or observing (mostly observing) at the time. The language is a bit simpler, especially in the beginning. This novel does not start well, but once it gets rolling, it takes you along. The road and the midwestern and western American landscape are again prominent.

The basic style is the same, though. Harrison’s paragraphs are cascades of artful sentences that apparently have little to do with each other, although appearances can be deceiving.

His protagonists are often more comfortable in an American past that may or may not have existed, and he gives different reasons for this, and for their sometimes formal diction. In this novel, Cliff is navigating between two women, who both represent troublesome aspects of modern life: besides his cell-addicted, psychobabbling girlfriend, he’s rebounding from his real estate dealing, upper middle class wannabe wife.

The conflict between Cliff’s age and his sexual desires and wandering eye provide discomfiting comedy that other oldsters may identify with. But the poignancy that stays with me comes from scenes like his memory of leaning for mutual support against a birthing cow he’s stayed with all night, or the photos he takes on the road, which are exclusively of various kinds of cattle. The sensual world is where Cliff lives, and reconciling it with the abstract demands and irrational insults of modern life seems to me to be the undercurrent common to a lot of Harrison's writing.

By the end of the novel he has apparently realized that he had become stultified (he likens farming to engineering) as well as confused by changes around him, and that he needed to liberate his creative impulses, and even reabsorb his English major self while staying true to his life on the farm. But his resolution involves sacrifice and compromise, an acceptance of solitude in order to preserve circumstances of living that he values. Again, this should be recognizable especially to his older readers--that is, his contemporaries.

Scrapbooks: a gracefully oblique look at America since the late 19th century through the scrapbooks that unknown (and a few well-known) people kept.

Scrapbooks: An American History
by Jessica Helfand
Yale Press

Helfand writes a fascinating interpretive history of the changing nature of scrapbooks in America, while following individual stories (and scrapbooks) for what they tell us about people in these times, from the late 19th century to the present revival of what is inevitably called "scrapbooking."

The volume is illustrated with scrapbook pages, or maybe it's more accurate to say that the graphic designed scrapbook pages are surrounded by columns of print. The scrapbooks include photos, souvenirs (leaves, motel keys) and oddities like stains and their matching stain-removers. They chronicle courtships and marriages (and one divorce), travels, wars, and everyday lives.

There are some famous names--Zelda Fitzgerald perhaps the most provocative, but poet Ann Sexton's may be the best at suggesting the creative role of keeping a scrapbook. But most of the people are unknown--mainly women (and mostly southern), but also some men, including soldiers.

Helfand includes different kinds of scrapbooks, like baby books, which are all legacies to the families involved, as well as social documents and (she argues) graphic art of a kind.

This volume is about the size of a scrapbook, but it's a hardback of coffee table book dimension. It's physically as well as intellectually weighty, so whether the clarity of illustrations and the design compensates for the book's unwieldiness is best judged by the individual book buyer. The writing however is graceful, and not academic: intelligent, oblique at times, but always lively and engaged. Some of the people (and their scrapbooks) make for absorbing stories.

Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the 20th Century is a fascinating overview from MIT Press.

Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century
by Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella
The MIT Press

This is a neat little history of attempts to devise and build visions of the "techno-city," which the authors define as a combination of high technology and a version of nature embodied in the "garden city" of Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the 20th century.

After laying the theoretical foundation, from Howard to Patrick Geddes to Lewis Mumford and beyond, the authors examine examples from Fascist Italy, Communist Russia and the U.S., from the New Deal to the Cold War to Disney, in an interesting and useful overview that whets the appetite for more.

While I don't always agree with the authors' point of view and conclusions, the history is fascinating. While the book isn't profusely illustrated, the photos and drawings are well presented. This is a handsome, well-designed book that covers a lot of ground in relatively few pages, with an eye to keeping the reader absorbed as well as to its scholarly contributions.

A dialogue between a distinguished Bay Area scientist and the Dalai Lama looks at how ordinary people can influence their emotions and how they are expressed. Reviewed below.

Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles To Psychological Balance and Compassion
By the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman
Times Books

Paul Ekman is one of the most respected scientists in the Bay Area, internationally famous for his painstaking work in identifying emotions from facial expressions, even “microexpressions” that indicate when someone is lying. He developed training based on these findings that the Secret Service uses. He also proved one of Darwin’s more obscure theories, that emotional expressions are the same across human cultures.

In early 2000, he agreed to participate in a dialogue of scientists with the Dalai Lama, mostly because he could bring his daughter along—she was a dedicated Buddhist who’d been to Tibet. It changed his life.

That discussion on “destructive emotions” was the eighth in the “Mind and Life” series with the Dalai Lama that will convene its 18th session this spring. There are books derived from 8 of them; I’ve read 7, and Destructive Emotions (Bantam) is among the best. While western sciences like neurobiology and psychology work from the outside with objective tests, Buddhism—particularly Tibetan Buddhism—has developed complex and subtle concepts from interior observation.

That 2000 conference shaped Ekman’s subsequent researches, and sent him back for some 39 hours of one-on-one dialogues with the Dalai Lama, resulting in this book. The subject is the title: Emotional Awareness. The topics include how emotions arise, how they are experienced and lead to behavior, as well as specific sets of emotions, from anger to compassion.

Apart from the concepts, there’s drama in the Mind and Life books (will science and “religion” clash?) and comedy (chiefly in the scientists’ reaction when the Dalai Lama asks an incisive question or spots a logical flaw. Few know that Tibetan monks are trained in debate—in the monastery it’s the principal spectator sport.)

Ekman is desperately interested in developing ways for people to learn how to behave better, beginning with the emotion or even the period just before the emotion engages. This book is formally a dialogue, with mini-essays on relevant topics by Ekman and others: both scientists and Buddhist scholars, as well as the growing number of Buddhist scientists.

The human drama in this book emerges in pieces, as Ekman reveals aspects of his own life—such as his abusive childhood, and his resulting problems controlling his temper—which suggest why he has been studying emotion for a half century.

Towards the end Ekman reveals something else. It was not just the discussion in 2000 but a wordless moment with the Dalai Lama that changed him: as he introduced his daughter, the Dalai Lama took his hand and held it. Ekman felt transformed. Like a proper scientist, he asked others if they noticed the change. His wife did. And he asked others if they’d had this experience: they had. Yet the science he knew could not account for it. But Ekman realized it was important because he knew it was real. Such an experience as well as others related to him by meditators and others perhaps led him to write: “We have seen it in our lifetimes again and again, that when we do not have the tools or methods to scientifically study something, we ignore it—or even worse, claim it does not exist.”

Though he doesn't mention it here, the scientific interest in meditation is itself a case in point. Not so long ago it was the consensus orthodoxy that people could not consciously control physical functions like heart rate. But some scientists studied Buddhist meditators, which led to "biofeedback" machines, the theory of "relaxation response," etc., and that made the idea more acceptable. Now meditators are being studied again, using brain imaging.

It is Ekman’s openness to evidence, no matter where it comes from or leads, that is science at its best. He investigates what matters to him as a human being, a husband, father, member of the community, and in view of the legacy he leaves to the future. That the steps along the way are still a bit awkward is less important than the illuminating attempt.

Machines R Us

Sherry Turkle, one of the most respected analysts and most interesting writers on new technologies, has edited an anthology of essays which brings together three traditions--"memoir, clinical practice, and fieldwork or ethnography"--as applied to human relationships with their intimate machines, from cell phones to dialysis machines. With Turkles introduction, the essays in The Inner History of Devices (MIT Press) explores how people and their machines in specific personal and professional redraw (or dissolve) boundaries between their devices and their own minds and bodies.

But what of society's relationship to the fast-expanding capabilities of these technologies? In Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World (MIT Press), Alex Pentland writes of a digital sensor--a "sociometer" that monitors and analyzes non-verbal 'signals' among groups of people. Much of the book is an argument for the importance of such signals, particularly in relation to the hot topic of social networks. But it is the existence and use of the sociometer that raises plenty of Nineteen Eighty-Four questions, unfortunately not well addressed.

John Leonard: who championed the best writing of our time, and wrote about it better than anyone: R.I.P.

John Leonard, R.I.P.

Studs Terkel, you'd expect, but John Leonard? I was surprised to hear he'd died, and even more surprised to see his age, only 7 years older than me. But when I was starting out reviewing books and editing reviews for the Boston Phoenix and sending him plaintive letters about assigning me reviews for the New York Times Book Review, those 7 years were probably important. Anyway, he never replied.

When he ran the Book Review in the early 70s, it was one of the hottest publications around, of any kind. He was a reviewer--both of books and television--who I read and learned from. He brought an energy to his prose that lit up reviewing as much as Tom Wolfe lit up magazine journalism in those years. His energy and verbal playfulness extended to the headlines. In some issues, they were more brilliant than the reviews.

Throughout his career, as The Guardian notes, he was a "force for good." His reviews were worth reading for themselves, but he made the books he reviewed exciting as well. I'll bet that having him review your book was about all the reward you'd need for writing it. He loved writing, he loved books--and they loved him back.

He wrote: "The library is where I've always gone – for transcendence, of course, a zap to the synaptic cleft, the radioactive glow of genius in the dark; but also to get more complicated, for advice on how to be decent and brave; for narrative instead of scenarios, discrepancies instead of euphemism. In the library, that secretariat of dissidents, they don't lie to me."

I remember stealing as much of his style as I could manage in those days, as others have ever since--Mark Lotto in the New York Observer, who admits he learned to write reviews by reading Leonard, adds: "but as much as I write and however long I live, I'll never in print equal his warmth, his decency, his willingness to draw ethical lines and then not cross them, his talent for rubbing this book against that one to see what electricity popped out."

Here's another memory of Leonard's stint at the Times Book Review, the Washington Post obit, and Laura Miller's remembrance in Salon, where he returned to reviewing books. Laura assigned exactly one review from me as well. So I finally appeared under the same banner, though I never met him. But I read him, and something from his approach and attitude got through to me. I'm grateful for that, even if this form is "limping toward an undeserved obsolescence," as Laura says.

And from Laura's article, I learned as well that I've inadvertently quoted him in this very piece. He actually said, "the books we love, love us back." And of course, he said it first.

Curiosity did not kill this cat. Studs Terkel, R.I.P.

Studs Terkel, R.I.P.

He was a Pulitizer-Prize winning author, and so much more.

He was one of our last living connections to parts of our past it is increasingly important we know about in depth: the Great Depression and FDR, the McCarthyite 50s. Studs Terkel got his start on radio with the Federal Writers Project, and his budding TV career was ended by the Blacklist. But he survived, and is most famous now for his books, which essentially invented what's now known as oral history. He died on Friday at the age of 96.

I remember his agile mind and mellow voice, and his shirts with the small checked pattern. He was a paragon of curiosity, a volcano of compassion; he knew a good story, and he could tell a million of them. He was a persistent force in getting black and white Americans to understand and glory in their common culture as well as common humanity.

He was a Chicago Everyman, and an American intellectual. He was an enthusiast. And therefore, unique and unforgettable. He cared most about the future.

Asked in Mother Jones interview to name one issue that's been neglected the most through the years, he didn't hesitate: "The big one is the gap between the haves and the have-nots--always...The biggest shame is that there is so much abundance around but that so many have so little and so few have so much."

Asked in this interview if he was going to retire, he replied: "I suppose if I have an epitaph it would be: "Curiosity Did Not Kill This Cat." I don't see retiring in the sense that we view it--I don't see how I could. Dying at the microphone or at the typewriter would not be bad."

"Distracted" by Maggie Jackson: Are you your own multi-taskmaster?

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
By Maggie Jackson
Prometheus Books

So Maggie Jackson is a columnist for the Boston Globe who—that’s mine, new ringtone, like it? Theme from Mad Men. Hi, no way, she did? Maybe, bye. So this book, which Wired Magazine really didn’t like cause—oh man, look at that score! Do you believe this? Anyway, because like multi-tasking: duh. Dude! Text from my mom—I’m like way late for, I don’t know, something. See ya.

The problem with the concept of distraction these days is having a clue about what you might be distracted from. For Maggie Jackson it’s attention and memory, which she sees as the keys to intimacy, meaning and culture. They’re threatened enough--and central enough to civilization--that she’s warning of dark ages ahead.

Actually the great Jane Jacobs’ last book, Dark Ages Ahead, is better on that scenario. But Jackson folds in a lot of reporting as well as facts to make her central argument: “Relying on multitasking as a way of life, we chop up our opportunities and abilities to make big-picture sense of the world and pursue our long-term goals. In the name of efficiency, we are diluting some of the essential qualities that make us human.”

Jackson is worried about consciousness sliced and diced by the technologies conveniently packaged in Iphone arrays, and workplaces now reconfigured because of them. She quotes a study of workers who “not only switch tasks every three minutes during their workday but that nearly half the time they interrupt themselves.” Others are tethered to their jobs 24 hours a day because of these engines of access, so they’re forced to be their own multi-taskmasters. She quotes a psychiatrist asking, “How do you know you have ADD or a severe case of modern life?”

We all know this is crazy, but is it dangerous? If we are indeed “losing skills needed to thrive in an increasingly complex world: deep learning, reasoning, and problem-solving,” then it’s worth considering.

Sure, Jackson goes over the top at times, and it’s ironic that she includes a lot that seems to distract from her central argument. But then, the sideshows of such social screeds are often entertaining (as in another new critique, Blubberland by Elizabeth Farrelly for MIT Press.) Still, when your scope is “how we live and what that means for our individual and collective futures,” you can mostly just start the discussion.

Jackson provides historical background, some deft reporting and even some counter-examples, like the attention being paid to how we pay attention, which includes new interest in forms of Buddhist meditation. Of course, who has time to read it?

Buckminster Fuller, a "comprehensive anticipatory design-science explorer," famous long ago, but still a voice for the future.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe
Edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller
Whitney Museum of American Art/Yale U. Press

I’m making a list of people who helped me ruin my life. Marshall McLuhan convinced me that in this high tech age you can live anywhere and be a successful writer. Not really: constant on-site ass-kissing in NYC or LA is still required. Buckminster Fuller convinced me to try writing about large-scale connections and trends. Bad idea: when successful books are about toothpicks or salt, such writing is harder to get published than it is to finish. On the other hand, Fuller could start talking about salt and end up with the universe, the way you’d never thought about it before.

McLuhan was briefly big-time famous, but Fuller was a quieter force for decades, with his greatest fame on college campuses in the 60s and 70s. (I heard him and observed him closer up at M.I.T. in ’73 or so.) Talks of that time were excerpted in Hugh Kenner’s still classic book, Bucky, and in Calvin Tompkins New Yorker profile, which is reprinted in this book. The Tompkins essay is as good an intro to Fuller as anything you'll find.

These days Fuller is best known for the geodesic dome, and one of the essays here is on his contribution to architecture. There are lots of illustrations and photos, since it’s basically an exhibition catalog. But Fuller also introduced the concept of “synergy,” (the whole unpredicted by the parts before they work together) long before corporate consultants pounded it into fairy dust. His ideas on computers and information were practically a blueprint for Google and Wikipedia. And he gave us “spaceship earth.”

The thing about that is he meant it literally, and on many levels. The key to Fuller is that basically he was a sailor. His spaceship earth wasn’t some airy metaphor: earth is a ship that depends on efficient design to stay afloat and keep everyone aboard alive on the food etc. it carries. Ships are designed to make the best possible use of the space within them, as well as of the basic forces of the planet and the universe. (Hence another of his influential ideas: “doing more with less.”) Most technology originated because ships used it (or wars did, or both.)

Which is why he coined the phrase, “utopia or oblivion.” The planet has to be ship-shape or it will sink. It’s an either/or choice.

Fuller was unique. He started not only with first principles, but by re-thinking first principles. He accepted nothing as axiomatic, though he developed his own axioms--and almost his own language. Reading him raw is a very different experience, but having it done it, very worthwhile. The fullest Fuller for me was his Ideas and Integrities.

Kenner makes much of Fuller's childhood experiences as a boy with very bad (and for a long while, uncorrected) vision, whose main relationship was with boats and the sea on a small island. Because he could see only shapes and he had to figure out how those shapes functioned and related to each other, he developed his kind of logic, and his intuition for basic forces and big patterns. Having grown up partly deaf, this rings true to me. Kenner also maintains that Fuller was able to mesmerize large crowds for hours at a time because he was very responsive to the mood, even to individual moods in the audience.

I hope this book helps revive interest in Fuller, particularly when computers and the Internet are providing tools that his vision could guide to profound purposes. This book provides reevaluation and solid overviews of his influence, especially in how he related to both scientists and artists, but it’s just an appetizer for the depth and breadth of his ideas. Though an essayist here writes that he “remained at heart a traditional humanist,” Fuller called himself “a comprehensive anticipatory design-science explorer.” We need more of those.

From the Personal to the Political


One Family's Response to Terrorism by Susan Kerr van de Ven. Syracuse University Press.

The Warrior: A Mother's Story of a Son at War by Frances Richey. Viking.

When the political intrudes on personal lives, the response is often more than personal. That's the case with these two books, and there are many others.

When Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was shot and killed, his family found itself involved in the twisted politics of Lebanon and beyond. One Family's Response to Terrorism by Kerr's daughter, Susan Kerr van de Ven is more about the politics and the world, as she researched the causes of her father's death. But she presents this information in the context of her own life, and her changing perceptions of her place in the world. This is an honest, detailed memoir that gains power as it goes, all the more impressive for the hard-won commitment to the rule of law that she affirms.

Frances Richey responded to her son Ben being deployed to Iraq in an intensely personal way that could be expressed only in verse. The Warrior traces her journey as a mother and a teacher dealing with her son's military training. "It was easy to think of warrior/as a yoga posture, until my son/became a Green Beret..." When Ben is deployed, she writes about his letters home and the inevitable memories of his childhood. These verses include ruminations on the world shaped by the political , but they always return to the personal, where the effects are felt, and the consequences come home.