Kurt Andersen via The New York Times:

‘Does anyone under 50 know who Carlos Castaneda was? Around 1970, this anthropologist’s books of psychedelic adventures in Mexico with an Indigenous sorcerer named Don Juan turned him into one of the world’s most widely read writers. Today, he’s a little-remembered artifact. So why a serious biography by the writer and artist Ru Marshall?

Castaneda had a wide-ranging cultural influence. And he was a dark, fascinating character, a Peruvian transplant to California who rebranded himself in the 1980s as a wizard, distilling his respectable mass popularity into a small, lucrative cult. In Marshall’s hands, “American Trickster” is smart, thoughtful — and all too timely….’