SOURCE: Review of The Fire from Within, in New York Times Book Review, June 10, 1984, p. 25.

[In the following review of The Fire From Within, Lesser objects to Castaneda's seemingly blind acceptance of Don Juan's authority and cruelty.]

Carlos Castaneda has doggedly gone on writing his guidebooks to the mystical wisdom of Don Juan—The Fire From Within is the seventh—but probably few people recall any titles after The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality. By now it has come to seem merely ludicrous that a middle-aged man should subject himself to the indignities Mr. Castaneda undergoes in his efforts to become a "nagual." Good books have been written about spiritual apprenticeship (Christopher Isherwood's My Guru and His Disciple, for instance), but this is not one of them. A certain amount of obtuseness is apparently central to Mr. Castaneda's search—"In heightened awareness one is minimally...