Toffler Alvin. The Third Wave

William Morrow & Company, 1980. — 544 p. — ISBN 0-688-03597-3In a time when terrorists play death-games with hostages, as currencies careen amid rumors of a third World War, as embassies flame and storm troopers lace up their boots in many lands, we stare in horror at the headlines. The price of gold—that sensitive barometer of fear—breaks all records. Banks tremble. Inflation rages out of control. And the governments of the world are reduced to paralysis or imbecility.
Faced with all this, a massed chorus of Cassandras fills the air with doom-song. The proverbial man in the street says the world has “gone mad,” while the expert points to all the trends leading toward catastrophe.
This book offers a sharply different view.
It contends that the world has not swerved into lunacy, and that, in fact, beneath the clatter and jangle of seemingly senseless events there lies a startling and potentially hopeful pattern. This book is about that pattern and that hope.
The Third Wave is for those who think the human story, far from ending, has only just begun.