The story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American life, American Trickster is an allegory for the Trump era, a trenchant critique of academia's complicity in distorting and erasing Indigenous culture, and a deep dive into the mechanics of New Age spiritual abuse.
Smart, thoughtful — and all too timely ... It’s definitive, exhaustive — sometimes to a fault. We learn the names and pseudonyms of dozens of minor figures in Castaneda’s life, inconsequential dates, endless details of banal encounters; we go down too many digressive, speculative historical and philosophical rabbit holes ... Still, with an American president’s adherents so cultlike (and even pro-psychedelics!), American Trickster is illuminating and relevant.
American Trickster, at more than 600 pages, is at once more information about Castaneda than any reader needs, and not nearly enough ... Perhaps a book that couched Castaneda’s story more deeply in the context of the ’70s counterculture and the nature of cults past and present would make his story clearer. But perhaps not — his tale is inevitably something to wonder at, evidence of humans’ capacity to spin a yarn that flatters our egos and urge to understand our spiritual selves, and to buy into what’s spun.
Massive but well-worth-reading ... To write American Trickster, Marshall visited Cajamarca twice, interviewed hundreds of people, and referenced countless books and articles. Their writing style, with its plethora of colons and sentence fragments, sometimes irritated me, and one gets bogged down in details of phenomenology and the ever-shifting names of cult members ... But the book as a whole overwhelms and provokes in a good way.
