Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler

This is a book about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by change. It is about the ways in which we adapt - or fail to adapt - to the future. It deals with common, everyday matters - the products we buy and discard, the places we leave behind, the corporations we inhabit, the people who pass at am ever faster clip through our lives. The future of friendship and familiy life is probed. Strange new subcultures and life styles are investigated, along with an array of other subjects from politics and playgrounds to skydiving and sex. What joins all these - in the book as in life - is the roaring current of change, a current so powerful today that it overturns institutions, shifts our values and shrivels our roots. Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspective of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it.