Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction to dynamism (libertarianism)...
Review: I read this book several years ago. I've continued to follow (loosely) Ms. Postrel's career. She now has a webpage where she writes nearly every day on current events, www.dynamist.com.
In my opinion, she does make a better essayist than a novelist. Her articles in the NYT, WSJ, Forbes, etc., are clearer than her sometimes tangential book. But in a good way, she presents a big-picture view of the future in this book, that social conservatives, liberal leftists, and other "statists" could really use a dose of.
Rating: 
Summary: shallow but peppy, a facile dichotomy
Review: Postrel has stumbled across a formula for non-fiction success -- seize upon an oversimplistic dichotomy, and write as if this is a key that unlocks tremendous understanding. The nature of reality is that it includes both dynamism (change) and stasis (order). It is merely silly, not profound, to emphasize one aspect of this dialectic. The title is similarly misleading -- no one is opposed to the future! Whether you want to live in a future of rampant genetic engineering is another matter entirely, a question of what sort of future. Postrel, editor of Reason, the libertarian magazine, and a columnist for Forbes (The Capitalist Tool), tries to mask her ideology in the book but it comes through loud and clear. For instance, she attacks Benjamin Barber (98), who has the temerity to question corporate globalization. But if you read Barber, you know that he is not against globalization per se, but is FOR democratic decisionmaking, which currently does not exist at the global level. (Barber has his own oversimplistic dichotomy -- "jihad versus McWorld"...) Postrel confuses herself with her own categories. Having grouped together everybody that's not a right-thinking dynamist and called them "stasists," (notice the similarity to "statists," the opposite of libertarian), Postrel says "their unity is misleading" because they can't agree among themselves (26). Well of course not! There is no "stasist" movement except the one that Postrel has concocted, and so no one is misled by "their unity" other than Postrel. I can say this, though, I am in favor of change! Good change, of course, not just change for the sake of change. Notice that Postrel could have named her preferred category "progressive" as opposed to "reactionary," the meaning is nearly identical to her "dynamism/stasism" labels, but the problem for her is that to be Progressive is associated historically with the reform-oriented Left, not the trickle-down Right! [For a much more thoughtful treatment of the changing nature of ideology in the post-Cold War world, see Anthony Giddens' "Beyond Left and Right."]
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