Summary
Each of Carlos Castaneda's books is a brilliant and tantalizing burst of illumination into the depths of our deepest mysteries, like a sudden flash of light, like a burst of lightning over the desert at night, which shows us a world that is both alien and totally familiar -- the landscape of our dreams.
Fire from Within is the author's most brilliant thought-provoking and unusual book, one in which Castaneda, under the tutelage of don Juan and his "disciples," at last constructs, from the teachings of don Juan and his own experiences, a stunning portrait of the "sorcerer's world" that is crystal-clear and dizzying in its implications.
Every aspect of Carlos Castaneda's life, from his literary credibility and marital history to his place of birth and circumstances of death, are shrouded in mystery. Born Carlos Aranha, Castaneda graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, and soon after he published the first of eight best-selling novels detailing his purported apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian wizard named Don Juan Matus. Castaneda's books, among them The Techniques of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts about Life, Death and the Universe, have sold over eight million copies, in 17 languages, around the world.
Little is known about Castaneda's personal life. He was briefly married to Margaret Runyan in 1960. They only lived together as man and wife for six months before going to Mexico for a divorce. In 1973, after realizing that their first divorce was not legal, Castaneda and Runyan were formally divorced.
Castaneda died of cancer on April 27, 1998, at his home in Westwood, California. His death was kept a secret for more than two months before word of it was finally leaked to the press.
(Bowker Author Biography)
