Rock Island: An American History is the entertainingly unvarnished history of the United States. History books tend to be boring, Rock Island isn't. It's a delightful history of the Native Americans who first settled on the scenic bluffs at the confluence of the Mississippi and Rock Rivers and of the white men who fought for the Indians' lands and built one of America's prototypical cities on the rivers' edge. Through Rock Island's 340 year history, since Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet were the first white men to walk the rivers' banks until the information age, Rock Island tells the...

This book is in pre-publication. An updated draft as of 8/3/2015 is available. Well before quagga mussels were found in southern Nevada's Lake Mead in 2007, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and other federal agencies had prepared protective measures in case the mussels were detected in the West. Without examining the biological requirements of quagga mussels, the TRPA overlooked dozens of scientific studies that showed quagga can't reproduce and survive in Lake Tahoe and implemented the nation's most aggressive watercraft inspection program. As water quality studies increasingly...