Just Finished Reading Mexico by James Michener

I've read a few of the late James A. Michener's historical novels before, and had always come away from the experience with a better feeling of other cultures and their history...although when it comes to specific people, location, and events, I'm often left unsure as to which ones were fictional and which really existed.  In his 1992 Mexico, it seemed that the author went a little overboard on the fictional side as he concentrated on an imagined bullfighting festival featured two fictional famous matadors facing off in a fictional city with a fictional American/Mexican reporter visiting his family's fictional roots, along with a recount of the fictional Indian nation and their fictional pyramid and customs from the past...as well as the protagonist's encounter as a child with a violent, fictional Mexican revolutionary general.  So in a way it was easier for me to avoid confusion and pretty much discard everything I read as products of Michener's fertile imagination.  I doubt that veracity wasn't exactly the prime motivating factor for him writing this book, anyway: the overwhelming focus here was the sport/art/atrocity of bullfighting, which to me ranks right down there with cockfighting and dogfighting with its abuse of animals for human entertainment.  But I could tell that Michener felt differently and was fascinated and enthusiastic with it...and maybe he was thinking he could be like Hemingway when that writer wrote extensively about bullfighting, albeit the Spanish version, in the novel As the Sun Rises.  So no, this novel was definitely not one of my favorites of Michener...and furthermore I felt that with these characters he was promoting stale, negative stereotypes of both Mexicans and Americans.  Maybe you'll like it more than I did, though, and I haven't given up on other works of his.  I thought his Space, Centennial, Alaska, Poland, and The Source were all excellent and look forward to reading another along similar lines...