Good insight into native american medicine. I'm a little disappointed in the turn the plot takes at the end, but since the content is autobiographical, there is not much that can be changed...

Native American. Healing

Quite frank and descriptive knowledge from an apprentice. David writes as a tribute to the old ways. I've seen pow wowing up north, there is a reason that the training takes years. Incredible read, yet references to healing methods are not practical for an herbalist. There are no powerful conjures to teach. Practices crushed by modern medicine, it's hard to imagine how they can be revived.

Good but hard to follow at times.

The ending wasn't what I expected but overall I really enjoyed the native stories and Shamanic rites as they were explained by David.

I don't buy it. This is a novel, not a memoir. What is described sounds like a fantasy story, not anthropology. I gave it two stars because I can't refute all of it. However...

I checked out this book because he mentions Nevada medicine man Rolling Thunder, who was a real medicine man. And he grew up in Oklahoma in a medicine culture, just as David Carson claims to have experienced.

And this book sounds nothing like what Rolling Thunder practiced or discussed.

I could certainly be wrong about this, but I've never heard of a medicine man or woman who called themselves a conjurer. Yes, you can say that medicine people frequently "work with" earth spirits to request some result in the health of a person in the ecological world of physical reality.

But conjuring sounds like the whole point is to become a wizard who weaves spells, an über individualist when the reality of medicine people is to keep people in a relationship of wholeness with the earth, the people and one's family and friends.

I bet most spend their time listening and talking, in a counseling sense, more than performing multi-hour long healing rituals. I think they also devote themselves to keeping the people on the good red road, so they also work in a preventative medicine sense.

I've met a few on the direct action frontlines against nuclear weapons testing and to save woodlands and sacred mountains. In personal fact, Rolling Thunder hasn't just inspired me metaphysically, by as a mentor for environmental movie-making. RT would use his senses to find *and film* U.S. Bureau of Land Management bulldozers chaining down piñon pine forests. I've since devoted much of my life to documenting the Earth First! activist subculture of which I have been an organizer activist since 1985.

But David Carson doesn't seem to have the slightest interest in the affairs of the world or any specific community. I found this to be the case in Barack Obama's first two memoirs too. He seems to have no connection to anything going on in the world he grew up in, *until* he became a community organizer as an adult. Those books are two of the three worst books I've ever read (the worst is Lo! by Charles Fort).

Even as a novel, Carson has written a book absent any offering of native American wisdom at all!

This is a vacuous book by a lying Carlos Castaneda wannabe.

Interwoven with Native American myth and tons of interesting transcendental life experiences, the author describes his near-brush with becoming a conjurer, or healer, in the tradition of the Native American. Sadly, we learn that the art of conjuring—healing people with smoke, herbs, plants, animals, and song—although handed down through many generations in Native tribes, has virtually disappeared in today's culture and will most likely die out completely due to modern medicine. To become a conjurer, one must go through many years of apprenticeship to acquire the wide body of knowledge and spiritual awakening to treat both sick and healthy individuals in a way that is completely individualized to their particular condition. Through the conjurer's heightened state of awareness, they can view a person's soul and detect both future and present ailments. There's no comparison to modern medicine in the sense that there is no profit to be gained by the healer, no man-made treatments are utilized and the healer has a open line of communication with the natural world—including animals—working in tandem to provide remedies.

It's shameful that once again Native American culture and traditions have been relegated into the categories of "evil" and "quackery," and left to die out among a dwindling population.

An interesting spiritual memoir.

What comes across is how the author is ill mannered, rude and ignorant, how he treated Mary, the questions he asked and general behavior. It was like he was a teenager who was brought up badly or on the streets.

It’s strange how the author used a white mans name and not an indigenous name that reflects the traditions of his people, tribe and ancestors.

There is wisdom and truth in these pages, and much can be learnt from this book

This was such an interesting book! There was so much packed in here, as Carson focuses on medicine and not just on his own experience. His last chapter is all about specifics about conjuring in Native American traditions. I found it so fascinating. Though some parts dragged, it was a good book.

Can't write; has nothing to say; thinks he's clever.

I couldn't quite get into this book, so I listened to it more as means to break the silence than anything else.

This autobiographical spiritually-charged work reminds me so much of the fantasy YA piece "Juniper" that I recently re-read. In this work, it is a man's reflection on his conjure training in the Native American tradition. He experiences out-of-body visions, aids in treating mysterious illnesses, and learns the secret language of plants and animals. This is his truth. In the YA work, Juniper learned all of these same things, with similar initiation practices, but it was presented to me as a young girl as fiction. It was incredible to hear of someone experiencing similar things within the confines of "truth" rather than "fantasy." Well written, captivating and enjoyable to read.