“I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. He influenced architects such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, and his conviction “that economic forces favored gargantuan service industries,” has been borne out by Amazon.Ī perceptive and cleareyed biography of a unique figure.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. Like a virus, he had “a unique talent for using a host to reproduce.” When he taught at various colleges, he recruited students as unpaid labor, taking their discoveries “to the next school on his list, burnishing his image as a genius by assimilating the work of many others.” Hailed as a futurist, among his predictions were online education and remote working. While not underestimating the fertility of Fuller’s imagination, Nevala-Lee reveals his subject’s reliance on colleagues and students. As Nevala-Lee notes, Fuller’s self-aggrandizement, mythmaking, “expansive claims” and “messianic language” informed many previous portrayals of him as a Renaissance man in the mold of Leonardo da Vinci. Cars and airplanes inspired him to design a blimp-shaped house and car. His interest in housing led him to build his own “scientific housing company,” Fuller Houses, to produce components that could be delivered as a package and assembled quickly on site. Together, they established the Stockade Building System, with Fuller as chief salesman and promoter-a role he inhabited throughout his long career in many ventures. After a stint in the Navy and a job in sales with a meatpacking company, Fuller joined his father-in-law, a designer with an interest in architecture, to invent lightweight building blocks for the construction of efficient, affordable housing. He entered Harvard in 1913 but did so poorly that he withdrew after a semester. Fuller, the great-nephew of transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, grew up in Milton, Massachusetts.

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), who famously created the geodesic dome. Novelist, biographer, and science-fiction writer Nevala-Lee draws on abundant archival material to fashion a thoroughly researched, comprehensive biography of architect, inventor, and “serial entrepreneur” R. A full portrait of the fascinating life of a famed disruptor.

Alec nevala lee astounding