Amer­i­can Trick­ster tells the sto­ry of the mys­te­ri­ous faux-anthro­pol­o­gist who pulled off the twen­ti­eth century’s great­est lit­er­ary hoax. The Peru­vian born Castaneda’s first book, The Teach­ings of Don Juan, which told of his psy­che­del­ic encoun­ters with a Yaqui shaman, was pub­lished in 1968 by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia. He was soon hailed as a rev­o­lu­tion­ary fig­ure in anthro­pol­o­gy, and his books topped the best­seller lists through­out the sev­en­ties. Lat­er, when his aca­d­e­m­ic rep­u­ta­tion began to declin­ing, he became the leader of a high­ly secre­tive cult. Fol­low­ing his death in 1998, five of his clos­est female asso­ciates com­mit­ted sui­cide in order to fol­low him into the next dimen­sion. From almost the moment he arrived in the U.S. in 1951, Cas­tane­da began telling friends he was of Sephardic descent. Some dis­missed this as one of his many tall tales. But it was one of the few tales Cas­tane­da — who was cir­cum­cised — stuck to. Ru Marshall’s book shows that, in fact, he like­ly was descend­ed from a high­ly secre­tive com­mu­ni­ty of Andean Crypto-Jews.