This thought-provoking book explores the interplay between science and mythical tales of great floods. Montgomery, a University of Washington geomorphologist and MacArthur fellow, digs into the evidence for Noah's flood, among other legendary deluges, and finds that it may refer to the formation of the Black Sea some 8,000 years ago. In that catastrophic event, rapid sea-level rise caused the Mediterranean to overflow into what was then a low-lying freshwater lake, inundating some of the earliest farming communities. He also traces the emergence of modern creationist thinking, which rejects geologic evidence for the age of the earth and for Noah's flood being a local, rather than a global, calamity.