SOURCE: Janeway, Eliot. “Toward a Cottage in Our Commerce.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (28 June 1983): 2, 10.

In the following review, Janeway praises aspects of Toffler's arguments in Previews and Premises, but notes that several of his core ideals are oversimplified.

I confess to never having read Alvin Toffler before. I found him [in Previews and Premises] not only extremely well educated but able to handle his intellectual inventory with virtuosity and aplomb. This is a good deal more than can be said for most fixtures in “pop culture.”

Ready admiration for Toffler's literary agility also presents a problem: It lowers defenses against immersion in the book itself.

Its scenario, like its style, is simplicity itself. All history, according to Toffler, is divided into three stages. The first spanned the 10,000-odd years before the industrial revolution, when survivors somehow managed to get themselves fed and get rid of non-survivors by...