Rating: 
Summary: hear the confused lady speak
Review: If you are interested in a authentic picture of the woman (without the benefit of class-conscious ghost-writers) you can turn to this site, where there is an interview with the Virginia, recorded on National Radio New Zealand: radio dot 50g dot com You will hear a VERY confused lady, saying absolutely nothing at all. Its all woffle to justify vulgar capitalism.
Rating: 
Summary: On The Verge...
Review: Postrel's book seeks to explain that business, associations, products and culture are products, not of meticulous design, but of constant experimentation and feedback. She explains that most of what we know has not and most probable cannot be articulated and that there is great reward for those who can articulate what people know but cannot explain. She explains that being on the verge - being on the frontier - is the place where the greatest ideas, inventions, and art are formed; the place where totally different people from seemingly different worlds collide, intersect, and come up with radical solutions and creations. This book is a valuable addition to the commentary on culture. It seeks to dispel the view that things should not change. Instead of allowing technocrats to legislate how things should be, we should provide an atmosphere where competing ideas can collide, combine, and transform each other into things that no one ever thought of before. I read hundreds of books and this one stands out as one of the most impressionable for its vision, knowledge, and clarity at how ideas and things in business and in the culture truly work. Congratulations to Ms. Postrel on a valuable tome.
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Summary: Figure things out now and save yourself pain in "The Future"
Review: I was at Printer's Inc bookstore in Mountain View, CA with a friend last month and he foisted this on me, assuring me that it would be an eye-opening sort of experience. I read the book from cover to cover in a couple days and I don't think my outlook on technology and the West Coast was changed as significantly as he claims his was, but I've got to admit that it was an excellent read and gave me much to ponder. Virginia Postrel is the editor of the uber-libertarian Reason Magazine and also writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal. This book is basically a fleshing out of her favorite theme- that technology is what is going to carry us through the 21st century intact and save us from death by exponential and catastrophic population growth, and that the future of our culture and the arts are essentially tied to technological development. But she also warns us that only unfettered technology can flourish. Regulation means expense and expense is the great bogeyman of research and development. If governments start regulating genetic engineering, the Internet and nanotechnology while they are in their infancy, there will be no bright tomorrow. One of the most interesting aspects of the book was the connection that Ms. Postrel draws between the neo-Luddite Jeremy Rifkin types of the left and the nationalist Pat Buchanans of the right. The idea that there is a coming realignment in politics is not original to her, but she presents the shift of political alliances away from left-right and into a freedom-tyranny oriented spectrum more capably than anyone else I have read. She doesn't paint a utopian future. She makes it clear that the road to tomorrow won't be easy for anybody, let alone everybody. But we won't get there at all unless the social problems of our day and the problems raised by increasingly rapid change are delt with by individuals, not bureaucracies. If the great enemy of the future is regulation, its best friends are the thinker, the private humanatarian and, most of all, the entrepreneur.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Be Afraid of the Future
Review: This book is full of social and economic information and, while not an easy read, is worthwhile. It's a useful corrective to the "sky is falling" school of thought that sets out to scare us about the future. For Postrel, the world divides into two sets of people. "Staticists" try to govern from the top down and put a brake on change. They dislike change because it upsets the status quo and threatens their position of power. On the other hand, "dynamicists" innovate from the bottom up; they welcome change even if it isn't their own. Although government research funding indirectly funded many of the labs that made research possible, the Internet was really a "dynamicist" creation because it was a loose swarm of dedicated "Nerds" and two or three in particular who made it happen--not, as everyone had predicted, a massive top-down government program. Postrel advocates for a free, "dynamicist" future, a kind of let-a-thousand-flowers bloom approach to society (my words, not hers). The lunatic fringe of the staticist wing would be the Unabomber, who so hated western civilization and its technology that he sought to destroy some of its makers. Not too far behind him are social theorists who advocate--seriously--reshaping America into a system of self-sufficient towns of 200,000 or so. This would be a great leap backward in technology, particularly if the towns were not allowed to share technology (and if you weren't allowed to emigrate from Smallville to Tinytown, say). My main gripe with this book is also its main strength--it is a polemic, an us-versus-them argument. Thus it paints in stark black and white. People who want change and progress are heroes; those who seek to curb it are obstructionists. We don't hear about people who protest a new nuclear power plant along a geological fault line because that would subvert her thesis--that would be an example of top-down innovation (the power company) runnning smack into a trickle-up status quo (the citizens). But for all that "The Future And Its Enemies" is a thoughtful, scrupulously researched and well reasoned argument, head and shoulders above the usual type of libertarian screed one usually gets around this type of subject matter. Now, would someone please hurry up and invent flying cars?
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing compilation, but "I am like - whoa" to this book
Review: This is an amazing compilation of the abundant things that individuals and groups can achieve, when given the freedom, of which book itself is an example. Beyond that, I could never agree that the basic conflict determining the future is that between dynamists and stasists. What some dynamists seek to do may be very evil, and others may be labeled as stasists, for example William Bennett, for doing what is arguably very beneficial. Not everything that can be done should be done, and there are abundant proofs of that. The concept of "nested rules" makes sense only when pursued within overall boundaries that ethically limit human endeavor. The real conflict in human affairs remains that between good and evil, and this book clouds that fact.
Rating: 
Summary: good premise but too long
Review: As a firm believer in the evolution of society (part of the choir so to speak), I enjoyed this book at first. Unfortunately, as the author went on and on, I just began to wish it would end. Overall, this entire premise would've been better covered in a 8-10 page magazine article. Brevity may be known as the source of wit, but for some of us, brevity is also the source of 5 star book reviews. As a plus, I thought the author did a good job of footnoting her anecdotes.
Rating:
Summary: lacking real insight
Review: This book is a tremendous read; but it lacks a profound insight, I believe. It would be churlish - as a non-American - for me to say that such a viewpont as Postrel's comes from a position of American economic and cultural (sic) domination. I can best put my point as follows: Postrel should read the Norwegian playwright H. Ibsen, especially 'The Doll's House' and 'The Wild Duck'. The issue Ibsen was addressing, is that one can be content with living in ignorance (indeed, one may say that the ignorant no no better), but that others may believe that is an inauthentic existence. Postrel's view is one of "everything out in the open for its own good... for human progress". Once so-called oppressed peoples know something of the outside world they would hardly want to go back to it - just as Plato had claimed for those living in the darkness of the cave. We would seem to crave knowledge, to go forward. But to where? As the British philosopher Terry Eagleton recently said "Feminism is not an orthodoxy in Nepal; more's the pity!" That is, we may suport human rights in Nepal, but it cannot stop there. So what of culture? Like Fukuyama, and Rand before earlier, Postrel sees culture as a blocking device to the future; a thought one sees coming often from USA (eg. Thomas Sorrell, Richard Rorty). Shall we let those still living within the shadows of the cave to stay there, or drag them out screeming? Once out, we will have shown ourselves to have been correct. But once out they are on their own; grow up! we shall tell them, and give them (or rather each individual) the protection of THE LAW. There is something of a hint of neo-Fascism (in Mussolini's sense of hygienic modernism)about Postrel; the irony being that those still living within the shadows of the cave are said to be kept there by enemies of the future, indeed even by those who have seen the outside and can use it to keep others under their control.
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly amateurish--straw men
Review: I started having serious problems with this book around Chapter 1, when Postrel lays out her "stasist" versus "dynamist" thesis. I don't disagree with her that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are ossified and meaningless, but this book does little to shed light on current political paradigms. Ms. Postrel appears to have started with her conclusion and then picked pop culture phenomenon, political leaders, etc. that fit into her theory, which is just as rigid as the "stasism" she claims to reject. She is a facile and, at times, entertaining writer, but this book sets up a static straw man to serve as a counterpoint to her "dynamists." The overall effect reads like a cut-and-paste senior thesis. Dynamism, in her somewhat murky view, appears to be warmed-over libertarianism, but don't count on the intelligence or critical thinking of a John Hospers in this volume.
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Summary: Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way
Review: In the Introduction ("The Search for Tomorrow"), Postrel observes: "The future we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, like all futures left to themselves, 'emergent, complex messiness.' Its 'messiness' lies not in disorder, but in an order which is unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever shifting, a pattern created by millions of uncoordinated, independent decisions....Ours is a magnificently creative era. But that creativity produces change, and that change attracts enemies, philosophical as well as self-interested. With some exceptions, the enemies of the future aim their attacks not at creativity itself but at the dynamic processes through which it is carried." In the final chapter, Postrel suggests that "We live in an enchanted world, a world suffused with intelligence, a world of our making. In such plenitude, too, lies an adventurous future." She then quotes Fredrich Hayek: "It is in the process of learning, in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence." Postrel responds: "It is in curiosity, problem solving, and play that we discover who we are. These are the very qualities and activities that make the future unknown and unknowable....We cannot build a single bridge from here to there, for neither here nor there is a single point. And there is no abyss to cross." On occasion, I include excerpts in my review because those who read reviews online do not have direct access to the text, as they would if browsing in a bookstore. In this instance, I include excerpts to suggest the seriousness of the issues which Postrel addresses in this brilliant book. There have always been "enemies of the future" (for reasons which Postrel addresses effectively) and there always will be. Peter Drucker once observed that one of the greatest challenges now facing organizations is to recognize and then manage the implications and consequences of a future which has already occurred. In Now or Never, Mary Modahl emphasizes the importance of rapid response to those opportunities which change creates. I am in great debt to Postrel and others who continue to remind us how perilous the future can indeed be but also how imperative it is to approach that future with passion as well as prudence...and especially, with a sense of delight...as we explore our global community, of course, but as we also seek out what is yet to be revealed within our hearts and minds.
Rating:
Summary: Enlightening
Review: Incredible book. Postrel gives a frank view of our society and the reader is blessed with clear-thinking and brevity. Our future's success depends on less government, less taxes, less control and more freedom. This book will illustrate the need to move beyond the static thinking that has hindered progress over the 20th century: bureaucracy, racism, sexism, intolerance, technophobia, trade unions, socialism, etc. This should be core material for any business student.
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