How do academics survive the bureaucracy, the petty jealousies, the absurdities of operating in the university? More important, how do they, as humans, cope with the darker shadows that enter professional lives-- illness, sorrow, death? Coyote, The Trickster, a well known figure in the American Indian world, is also the icon for communication scholar Tom Frentz. Frentz uses the survival strategies of The Trickster in his articulate, amusing, and often emotional autoethnography of striving for quality through the worlds of academia and medicine.