SOURCE: Ross, Mitchell S. “Alvin's Song.” American Spectator 14, no. 6 (June 1981): 27.

In the following review, Ross compares the central thesis of Future Shock to the core argument of The Third Wave.

“In January 1950, just as the second half of the twentieth century opened, a gangling twenty-two-year-old with a newly minted university diploma took a long bus ride through the night into what he regarded as the central reality of our time. With his girlfriend at his side and a pasteboard suitcase filled with books under the seat, he watched a gunmetal dawn come up as the factories of the American Midwest slid endlessly past the rain-swept window.”

That twenty-two-year-old, Alvin Toffler, was destined to become a prophet. His girlfriend, Heidi, was destined to become his wife and associate prophet. The above passage is an autobiographical pearl buried inside Toffler's most recent book of prophecy, The Third Wave. The third-person...