The fourth and final book of the don Juan series, Tales of Power, answers some of the questions the books have raised, leaves many other questions unanswered, and ends on a tentative note quite different from the open-ended, serial conclusion of the first books. Tales of Power is inconclusive, but as the book draws to its close the reader feels a strong sense of completion, a sense that Castaneda has said all he will say.

Like the previous books, Tales of Power repudiates much that has gone before. Drugs, we learned in Journey to Ixtlan, are not essential to the apprenticeship in sorcery. In the closing book, don Juan reveals that sorcery is not an end in itself, that it is not to be sought as the alternative to our commonplace sense of "reality." The sorcerer's way is not alternative but complementary to the average person's way. The...