Review: Previews and Premises

Previews and Premises by Alvin Toffler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought I had read all of Alvin (and Heidi) Toffler’s futurist books, but I had missed a few of the less popular ones. I was pleasantly surprised to find this hardback in a library sale, and enjoyed the musky old-book scent and the Kroch’s & Brentano’s price sticker. The book came out the year I started a well-paying job and started buying books at places like Kroch’s, so it was nice to harken back. About the book: Reading it was like revisiting the heady late 70s, where futurists talk about trilateralism, the promise of interactive cable TV, and the false fear of Japanese productivity. Toffler was the only author I read that talked about Marxism, and here it is a constant theme. This is not the typically “authored” book. The book is a culmination of a number of interview questions and answers, and the interviewers seemed very much in the academic/philosophical world, and many of the “questions” asked of Toffler were thinly veiled attempts to shoot down his theories or cause him to say something contradicting something else he said. The games of academics. Toffler has none of it. Good for him. This was mostly just a rehash of “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave” concepts, but told in this q&a manner you might expect from a hosted television talk show. And no surprise, Toffler talks about filming documentaries and giving speeches about his concepts throughout. There is a little bit of personal autobiography that adds to the interesting parts here, but overall, I’d suggest this only for those that want additional background or slightly deeper discussion of his two top books, from around the same time those books came out. Now to get back to my interactive cable TV.

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