Brzezinski (the head of Columbia University's Research Institute on Communist Affairs) is perhaps writing too much these days to write well. In any case, the "technetronic" theme (technology plus electronics, you guessed it) provides a mere teaser for his sonorities on the subject of America's present and future geopolitics and the state of the Communist sphere. Brzezinski has updated his cold-war perspective to allow as how the U.S. is "victimizing" the Third World. Then he soars into the ideological stratosphere with the perception that universal religions and beliefs are breaking down to yield an indeterminate new conceptual scheme. But meanwhile New Left totalitarianism has threatened the traditions of "rational humanism" and "participatory pluralism." The most substantive sections discuss upheavals and undercurrents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Otherwise it's a pretentious pastiche, deracinating bits and pieces of Bell, Lipset, Clark Kerr, et al. and oscillating between cliches about "science" and straw-in-the-windiness, with the boredom index an exponential function. The name and the topic, however, also offer a multiple power. (Kirkus Reviews)