AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY by William Irwin Thompson. 180 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.
This book is superficial, fragmentary, tendentious, scholastically disreputable and continuously fascinating. The author is billed as a humanities professor (32 years old, Ph.D. from Cornell, now teaching at York University in Toronto). In fact, anyone can see that he is some kind of mage, adept at issuing spells and performing mind-rattling tricks with bits of brimstone. Still, the questions that he poses are enormous. Where on earth is man heading next? Where, for that matter, has he been?...