caitri | A Book a Day: Iberia

Every day (ish) I'm writing about a book I like. Hey, remember when we could go places for realsies? Those were good times. Michener is remembered mostly for his novels, especially Sayonara and Hawaii, but I like his nonfiction, and Iberia is my favorite. (Btw he also wrote an investigative book on the Kent State Massacre that as far as I can tell is the only book of his to ever go out of print for some reason.) In fact, this is a book I have bought to give to people. It's basically a fat series of essays about Spain, including regional histories, famous figures from the Roman Empire (I don't think I realized Martial was Iberian before reading this--but he was!) to the "now" of its 1968 publication date. He talks about food, people, politics, art, pub crawls, language and dialect variations, and possibly even kitchen sinks. Michener is very good about doing things like providing first-person accounts of meals and conversations, and then disappearing naturally into narratives about historical and political analysis.