I got a revised copy of the book at a botanica in Brooklyn about 6 months ago. I was reluctant at first to get it because I had read another book by this Cuban-American Babalawo who was based in NYC disparaging it. According to him, there had been a lot of inaccuracies in the book because her informants repeatedly lied to her (apparently, they didn’t trust her so much because she was an outsider and they were suspicious). The revised version I bought points this out as being a reason she had to revise the text as she found out later when she finally got some initiations done. It still basically reads the same way that you describe it, though. The Babalawo guy’s last name who wrote the other book that basically said “Don’t get the Wippler book cuz it’s crap” was Canizares (if I remember rightly) and it’s an autobiography, but also he puts in a lot of other details that were educational for me as an outsider–he was also a PhD in Anthropology. Ah, just googled his name–Raul J. Canizares. And the book was called: Cuban Santeria. He wrote some other books about specific orishas, but when I tried to get them on Amazon awhile ago they were either out of print or, after months of waiting, Amazon told me they couldn’t get a copy my way… The other really good book I read about related spirituality was Voodoo in America by Davis. It’s basically one white guy’s search for the traces of the original African religions that the slaves brought over to the U.S. Shout out to Rev. Max.

Personal accounts of close encounters with spirits, how-to spells, history & anthropology?

Yeah, all of that sounds really good.

Personal accounts of close encounters with spirits, how-to spells, history & anthropology?

You’d go nuts if you ever saw my bookshelf… pretty much every book ever written in english on gnosticism and the ATRs both.