[The Teachings of Don Juan] achieves three things: (1) it presents a description of personal experience with peyote, datura, and hallucinogenic mushrooms; (2) it describes the relationship between a student anthropologist and an elderly North Mexican Indian; and (3) it offers an analysis of a set of concepts and a pattern of thought concerning a realm of knowledge important in the Indian's world view. (pp. 30-1)

The description of the young anthropologist's hallucinogenic experiences, under the tutelage of the Indian, is remarkably vivid and compelling. Certainly what Castaneda has put on paper, recording the highlights of his several experiences with each of the three drugs, ranks with the best accounts by experimental psychologists, such as those by Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell with peyote and the Wassons with hallucinogenic mushrooms. They seem to me superior to the various literary accounts, such as those of Aldous Huxley. While the evocative descriptions are...