The Bronzed Beasts (Guilded Wolves Series, Bk. 3) - Roshani Chokshi

 The last of the trilogy and while it was entertaining, I still don't think I'd recommend this to anyone. By the third one, I saw that the author was using a formula for these books and while the idea was fun, the characters were as polarized as ever, spent a stupid amount of time obsessing over each other and it was all rather predictable. Good ending though, which is very important in my opinion. 

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History - S. C. Gwynne

 "None of these failures could be blamed on the tangled government bureaucracy. They were the product of the endemic corruption and graft for which the Indian office had justly become infamous by the 1860's. The Indian Peace Commission on 1867 had been so scandalized by what they found out in the various agencies that they wrote, "The records are abundant to show that agents have pocketed the funds appropriated by the government and driven the Indians to starvation. It cannot be doubted that Indian wars have originated from this cause. For a long time, these officers have been selected from partisan ranks not so much on account of honesty and qualification as for devotion to party interests, and their willingness to apply the money of the Indian to promote the selfish schemes of local politicians."  As time went by, the agents proved stupid as well as corrupt."

This sounds stunningly familiar to something else happening in the government right now.... yea?

Current politics aside, this is a fascinating book into the western frontier, but I do feel it has perhaps aged poorly. I see it's only 15 years old, but the author sounds like books written longer ago, just grazing over the personal and emotional turmoil by these events for both sides and speaking rather degradingly about the Comanches specifically, from their polygamy and religious beliefs to their diet and personal hygiene. 

I do appreciate what these people were capable of, but again, the book seems to just gloss over some truly impressive feats or horsemanship. Maybe this would be better in a visual from of media? 

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood - Trevor Noah

 It's absolutely crazy that people have lived this way. South Africa's apartheid was simply the most insane thing a society put up with for so long. It's a great book and lots of fun! I would highly recommend this to everyone.

Bitterblue - Kristin Cashore (Seven Kingdoms Trilogy, Bk. 3)

 A pretty good book, a little too happy because nearly all people seem to have good intentions, but I enjoyed it. Will continue with others...

More Haunted Hoosier Trails - Wanda Lou Willis

 I liked how this book was organized by county and it gave a brief description of the history of the county before just jumping into the stories. I also enjoyed the fact that most of the places were described to the point that you could go visit them. I do wish there was more meat to the stories, but I know the author was working with only what she was told. 

Full Bloom in Texas: Planter's Guide and Photos - Allan R. Kuethe

 Mostly pretty pictures and not the helpful info about keeping these flowers in your garden like I was hoping. Eh, now I know my salvia does ok in partial shade, which may come in handy. 

It was all a Lie: How the Republican Party became Donald Trump - Stuart Stevens

 This was a pretty wild ride, which I think is best exemplified by the author better than I could do:  

- "Even when Mitt Romney stepped forward and called out Trump for what he clearly was- "a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University"-no other Republicans of note rallied behind him to speak publicly what most were saying privately.  How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don't. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren't deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power."

- "So I launched my career in the party that prided itself on being the "family values" party. When pundits marvel that the Republican Party could accept a man like Donald Trump, who has five kids from three wives and talks in the public about having sex with his daughter, they're missing the point. Trump doesn't signal a lowering of standards of the morality by Republican voters. Instead, he gives them a chance to prove how little they have always cared about those issues. Trump just removes the necessity of pretending. "Family values" was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, "family values" was useful in attacking and defining Democrats. It was just another weapon to help portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream. I was an "otherness" tool . . . The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as "normal" and everything else as "not normal"."

- "The long list of high-profile evangelical figures who scammed the public and lived their lives exactly opposite of what they preached reveals the essential truth of the Moral Majority and the like efforts it spawned. in The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe, an evangelical who grew up in the movement, describes the long list of disgraced preachers as "figures who were cartoonish, dramatic, deceitful, wealthy, white, smarmy, judgmental, callous, and above all hypocritical Charlatans." This is about as perfect a description of Donald Trump as on can find. 

- "To understand how white evangelicals could embrace Donald Trump, consider him the ultimate white megachurch preacher. The congregation has been conditions to accept leaders who are lying, philandering frauds who live extravagant lifestyles far above their own means. But even the larger-than-life flaws and sins of these men - and they are all men - serve to convince the flock that they are unworthy to judge such men. Their followers proudly claim they favor "authenticity" as a virtue but are drawn to the most elaborately artificial of men who cosmetically, chemically, and surgically alter their physical presence as if to affirm they were of a different, more godlike persona . . . The very strangeness of the figures makes them harder to judge by the standards of normal human behavior. Their entire artifice is to appear abnormal and thus escape judgement. These men are "different" and should be judged differently."

- "Decency, kindness, humility, compassion - all touchstones of a Christian faith - have no value in today's Republican Party. All his life, Donald Trump has believed these to be weaknesses, and now that is the view of the party he heads." 

- "So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump? What value si left in the intelligent reasoning? Donald Trump didn't crash the guardrails of political and civil standards; rather, the highway officials eagerly removed the guardrails and stood by cheering as the lunatic behind the wheel drove the party straight off the cliff of reason.  When a Williams Collage and Harvard Law grad like Bill Bennett considers a man who found the nuclear triad a puzzling mystery in a primary debate qualified to be president, the idiotocracy is in full ascendant."

- Justin Amash (congressman): "Because you have to look at what you are doing first. You have to care about what you're doing. If you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don't have to do the right thing, that society will break down, and you will have no liberty."

- In How Democracies Die, the authors described a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.     ....(sound familiar?)

- The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. This means the party demands dishonesty as a trait of membership . . The vast majority of the Republican elected officials know Donald Trump is unfit to be president and pretend otherwise. 

- What does a center-right party in America stand for? Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution. Now? Can anyone honestly define what the Republican Party stands for beyond "owning the libs"? Whatever that means. Can any governing party exist as a credible force with no defined principles? 

- Special interest groups are like terrorists: they test for weakness and exploit fear. What happened to the Republican Party is that slowly over half a century the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology started discovering that they could force reasonable people to support unreasonable positions through fear. The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over  a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong. Today the leaders of the Republican Party follow Donald Trump's lead and routinely attack the foundations of law enforcement, from the FBI to the Justice Department to the judiciary. At first glance it seems stunning to witness a party that once defined itself as a "law-and-order party" take the same position as every drug dealer ...

- The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in the polarizations. Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of the Democratic legislators. 

- But few if any Republican politicians will even broach the possibility of a tax increase. The result of this weakness will be generations forced to pay off the debt and interest resulting from the simpleminded conspiracy of the silence that is a central tenet of Republican politics.