{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028085106382978724, 'fraction_numerical': 0.001702127659574468, 'mean_word_length': 5.125, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Bretz's Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood, by John Soennichsen

John Soennichsen’s masterful biography of the noted geologist, J. Harlan Bretz, contains three fascinating stories. The first story is Bretz’s biography; and Bretz lived a long, full and remarkable life. Second is the story of the painstaking accumulation of geologic evidence in support of the repeated, cataclysmic “Missoula Floods” that scoured much of Washington State and the Columbia River Gorge, and left a rich veneer of silts on the floor of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The third story is the riveting narrative of the struggle between Bretz and colleagues who were unwilling to relinquish a longstanding geologic paradigm. This “third story” is further complicated because the U.S. Geological Survey and a succession of its leaders were an “institutional authority,” which also resisted Bretz’s rigorously acquired body of field work in support of his flood theory. The time between Bretz’s initial field work in the Channeled Scablands, the landscape scoured by the Missoula Floods, and the formal acceptance of his work by other geologists was 44 years.