Rating: 
Summary: Want the truth about this book?
Review: Erik Durschmied's The Weather Factor: How Nature Has Changed History documents the influence of weather through history. From the storm that devoured Varus' legions in AD 9 to the monsoons of Vietnam in '65, Durschmied chronologically outlines the inescapable impact of the elements through a primarily military-driven theme.
While a well-meant endeavor to capture the essence of the historical ramifications of weather, Durschmied fails to appeal adequately to either the historian or meteorologist. He tritely draws from the ignored lessons of Napoleon that fostered Hitler's failure during Barbarossa. A historian knows already of both Napoleon and Hitler's defeat within the context of the harsh Russian winter and is afforded little new historical insight. The weather-savvy reader gleans no novel data or understanding either. Essentially, Durschmied treads on hackneyed ground only to see his footprints lost in a muddled field of bathos.
In the midst of a developing martial theme, the sudden interjection of Ireland's potato blight of the 1840's solidifies the strain of disorganization featured in this book. While the societal and economic ramifications of the climatologic fluctuation promoting the blight were felt internationally, this chapter adds an element of disruption and confuses the theme-driven reader. However, larger problems plague the organization of Durschmied's work. While a sound chronological method is applied, Durschmied interjects several terse chapters that fail to do justice to the most important events of the modern military age. D-Day, the largest military campaign launched by man, is afforded a mere two pages. Only a page and a half are reserved for weather's impact on the target selection in 1945 that launched the Nuclear Age in Hiroshima. Durschmied seems to communicate his inability or lack of desire to either research the events or make substantial claims from these scenarios. Rather he allows his work to be lost in oftentimes laborious narratives about seemingly inconsequential events when compared to the scale and impact of Hiroshima and Normandy.
In his apocalyptic conclusion, Durschmied leaves the reader dissatisfied and confused. After writing of the potential power of anthropogenic forcing in the atmosphere, granting humanity a fuller, more hydrated life, Durschmied waves his goodbye with one lone, unfounded, unexplained paragraph:
Weather fronts are still as unpredictable as they were during the days of Noah. We must learn to live in harmony with nature. It would be folly for man to try to master the elements; there are simply too many imponderables.
There is only one certainty:
Man has managed to harness almost everything.
But God still controls the elements. In a failing attempt to provide some conclusive form to his already laboriously disorganized read, Durschmied flails with illogic and inconsistency.
The Weather Factor lacks entertaining passages but for the chapter documenting Admiral Halsey's typhoon-battered fleet. Fairly blending a historical narrative with meteorological data, Durschmied provides a glimpse in this chapter of what this book should have been. Yet this lone oasis is not enough to redeem an overall dissatisfying trounce in the world of weather and history.
Read it? Nah.
Rating:
Summary: Want the truth about this book?
Review: Erik Durschmied's The Weather Factor: How Nature Has Changed History documents the influence of weather through history. From the storm that devoured Varus' legions in AD 9 to the monsoons of Vietnam in '65, Durschmied chronologically outlines the inescapable impact of the elements through a primarily military-driven theme.
While a well-meant endeavor to capture the essence of the historical ramifications of weather, Durschmied fails to appeal adequately to either the historian or meteorologist. He tritely draws from the ignored lessons of Napoleon that fostered Hitler's failure during Barbarossa. A historian knows already of both Napoleon and Hitler's defeat within the context of the harsh Russian winter and is afforded little new historical insight. The weather-savvy reader gleans no novel data or understanding either. Essentially, Durschmied treads on hackneyed ground only to see his footprints lost in a muddled field of bathos.
In the midst of a developing martial theme, the sudden interjection of Ireland's potato blight of the 1840's solidifies the strain of disorganization featured in this book. While the societal and economic ramifications of the climatologic fluctuation promoting the blight were felt internationally, this chapter adds an element of disruption and confuses the theme-driven reader. However, larger problems plague the organization of Durschmied's work. While a sound chronological method is applied, Durschmied interjects several terse chapters that fail to do justice to the most important events of the modern military age. D-Day, the largest military campaign launched by man, is afforded a mere two pages. Only a page and a half are reserved for weather's impact on the target selection in 1945 that launched the Nuclear Age in Hiroshima. Durschmied seems to communicate his inability or lack of desire to either research the events or make substantial claims from these scenarios. Rather he allows his work to be lost in oftentimes laborious narratives about seemingly inconsequential events when compared to the scale and impact of Hiroshima and Normandy.
In his apocalyptic conclusion, Durschmied leaves the reader dissatisfied and confused. After writing of the potential power of anthropogenic forcing in the atmosphere, granting humanity a fuller, more hydrated life, Durschmied waves his goodbye with one lone, unfounded, unexplained paragraph:
Weather fronts are still as unpredictable as they were during the days of Noah. We must learn to live in harmony with nature. It would be folly for man to try to master the elements; there are simply too many imponderables.
There is only one certainty:
Man has managed to harness almost everything.
But God still controls the elements. In a failing attempt to provide some conclusive form to his already laboriously disorganized read, Durschmied flails with illogic and inconsistency.
The Weather Factor lacks entertaining passages but for the chapter documenting Admiral Halsey's typhoon-battered fleet. Fairly blending a historical narrative with meteorological data, Durschmied provides a glimpse in this chapter of what this book should have been. Yet this lone oasis is not enough to redeem an overall dissatisfying trounce in the world of weather and history.
Read it? Nah.
Rating: 
Summary: Not exactly what it purports to be
Review: First the positive: "The Weather Factor" is a readable book that tells some good stories. Now the negative: it is also not terribly insightful for anyone who knows a lot about history. If you already know the story of events such as the Irish potato famine, the retreats of Napoleon and Hitler in the face of the Russian winter, or of the massive Pacific storm that savaged Admiral Bull Halsey's fleet in December 1944, then you aren't going to learn anything new. For a book allegedly about the weather, Durschimed spends so much time giving general background information that the weather itself gets the short shrift in his narratives. He could just as easily have called the book a collection of random historical essays, which is essentially what it is. The two most bizzare chapters come at the end. One tells of his own personal experience as a war corrrespondant in the Mekon Delta, like the revelation that jungle conditions hampered American war efforts in Vietnam is a something new. The other is his essay on possible future attempts to use weather control devices as military weapons. This is an intriguing notion, but anyone who knows anything about science will realize that the technology for such a possibility will never be had, if at all, by 2025, which is the random date picked by the author for the title of the chapter. Overall, "The Weather Factor" is not a bad book, but people with a real interest in weather as well as history buffs will likely be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Not exactly what it purports to be
Review: First the positive: "The Weather Factor" is a readable book that tells some good stories. Now the negative: it is also not terribly insightful for anyone who knows a lot about history. If you already know the story of events such as the Irish potato famine, the retreats of Napoleon and Hitler in the face of the Russian winter, or of the massive Pacific storm that savaged Admiral Bull Halsey's fleet in December 1944, then you aren't going to learn anything new. For a book allegedly about the weather, Durschimed spends so much time giving general background information that the weather itself gets the short shrift in his narratives. He could just as easily have called the book a collection of random historical essays, which is essentially what it is. The two most bizzare chapters come at the end. One tells of his own personal experience as a war corrrespondant in the Mekon Delta, like the revelation that jungle conditions hampered American war efforts in Vietnam is a something new. The other is his essay on possible future attempts to use weather control devices as military weapons. This is an intriguing notion, but anyone who knows anything about science will realize that the technology for such a possibility will never be had, if at all, by 2025, which is the random date picked by the author for the title of the chapter. Overall, "The Weather Factor" is not a bad book, but people with a real interest in weather as well as history buffs will likely be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: No comparison to The Hinge Factor
Review: I very much enjoyed reading "The Hinge Factor" and so I bought this book hoping to find more similar reading material. Chapter 1 raised my doubts and after finishing Chapter 2 I was really disappointed by this book. The episodes are really lenghty and somewhat hard to read/follow - the book is not well written. The most disappointing fact, however, is that this book has not very much to do with military history but focuses almost entirely on political history. The influence of the weather, as the title of the book suggests, seems almost constructed and bears almost no meaning to the events described.
Rating:
Summary: Similar to Hinge Factor
Review: If you're interested in the weather (as the title might just lead you to expect), don't bother. If your interests lie in military history, then you may enjoy it. The book is littered with factual innacuracies and bizarre grammar (is this a translation?, or is Durschmied a non-native English speaker who couldn't be bothered to have his text proofed?) and the author mixes fact with fiction to such an extent that one ends up presuming the whole thing is made up and tossing it in the nearest rubbish bin.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting take on weather and military history
Review: My local library had this book filed under 551, i.e., in the meteorology section, which I think is an error. This book is more of a military history focusing on how weather has influenced the outcome of battles and therefore of history. The science of weather plays a small part. That being said, it's an interesting read. It's divided into chapters, each devoted to a specific incident. Some are reasonably well-known, such as the battle at Teutoburger Wald that cost Rome three legions (included here due to a thunderstorm that bogged down the Romans and led the Germanic "barbarians" to think that their gods were on their side), the typhoon that destroyed Kublai Khan's fleet heading to invade Japan, and Napoleon's disastrous march on Russia that was devastated by the legendary Russian winter. Others were (to me, at least) more obscure: the thunderstorm that scattered the mobs in Paris and thereby cost Robespierre his supporters, the weather during the Battle of the Bulge that first protected the Germans from air attack and then cleared to leave them vulnerable to the Allies' unchallenged fighters and bombers, and the typhoon that devastated the American Pacific fleet in World War II. The one non-battle chapter focuses on the Irish potato famine, which was facilitated by a cool, rainy summer that allowed the potato-killing fungus to flourish. The penultimate chapter, about fighting in the Mekong delta during the Vietnam War, provides a change since it's written in the first person. The author, a war correspondent, was actually there, and gives a personal view of what it's like to fight natives in the muggy misery of a tropical jungle. The final chapter addresses the possibility of manipulating the weather in the future to provide better prospects for one's own forces or worse prospects for the enemies'. This has apparently already been tried, with American forces trying to get it to rain on the Ho Chi Minh trail in order to bog down Viet Cong supplies. The book is readable enough, though with one strange quirk: footnotes that provide additional information rather than references. These quickly become distracting, and I think some should have just been incorporated into the regular text while the rest should either have been eliminated or moved to the back. It's a strange affectation and not at all helpful. So, overall it's an interesting book even if not what I expected.
Rating: 
Summary: It's Not Just About the Weather
Review: Reading Durchmied's "The Weather Factor" (the sequel to last year's "The Hinge Factor") is one of life's guilty pleasures. Although I sometimes wondered whether the author might be one of those who is "often in error, but never in doubt," I didn't see any obvious mistakes. More to the point, I thoroughly enjoyed the author's style and selection of events. The book is not about the weather as such, so it doesn't discuss the nuances of isobars or storm fronts; rather, it focuses on how the weather has changed the outcome of selected historical events. Durschmied's new book is thus a continuation of his narrative in "The Hinge Factor." Among the events the author describes: the destruction of three Roman legions in Teutoberger Wald in AD 9 in the face of a wild thunderstorm; the "divine wind" that destroyed the Mongol invasion fleet in 1281; the destruction of Napoleon's Grand Army in 1812; the Irish potato famine of the 1840s; war in the Alps, 1916-18; the defeat of Hitler's Russian offensive in 1941; and a somewhat surprising reason why the Soviet Union was not willing to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile crisis. Durchmied writes with a dramatic skill that brings these events to life. One of the best measures of how much I enjoyed a book is how much I look forward to the next one by the same author. I noticed that Durchmied's books are published in Europe about a year before they arrive in the United States, so I visited Amazon's UK site to see whether Durschmied had written anything new. In fact, he has: he just published a new book called "The Whisper of the Blade," which appears to be a history of revolutions. I've already ordered it, and I'm looking forward to its arrival here on the other side of the pond.
Rating:
Summary: It's Not Just About the Weather
Review: Reading Durchmied's "The Weather Factor" (the sequel to last year's "The Hinge Factor") is one of life's guilty pleasures. Although I sometimes wondered whether the author might be one of those who is "often in error, but never in doubt," I didn't see any obvious mistakes. More to the point, I thoroughly enjoyed the author's style and selection of events. The book is not about the weather as such, so it doesn't discuss the nuances of isobars or storm fronts; rather, it focuses on how the weather has changed the outcome of selected historical events. Durschmied's new book is thus a continuation of his narrative in "The Hinge Factor." Among the events the author describes: the destruction of three Roman legions in Teutoberger Wald in AD 9 in the face of a wild thunderstorm; the "divine wind" that destroyed the Mongol invasion fleet in 1281; the destruction of Napoleon's Grand Army in 1812; the Irish potato famine of the 1840s; war in the Alps, 1916-18; the defeat of Hitler's Russian offensive in 1941; and a somewhat surprising reason why the Soviet Union was not willing to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile crisis. Durchmied writes with a dramatic skill that brings these events to life. One of the best measures of how much I enjoyed a book is how much I look forward to the next one by the same author. I noticed that Durchmied's books are published in Europe about a year before they arrive in the United States, so I visited Amazon's UK site to see whether Durschmied had written anything new. In fact, he has: he just published a new book called "The Whisper of the Blade," which appears to be a history of revolutions. I've already ordered it, and I'm looking forward to its arrival here on the other side of the pond.
Rating:
Summary: Really good, except one problem.
Review: The stories were really good except at the end he goes into controlling the weather. It seems nasty, and awful, and the weather should remain nature's force, not ours(nor "god's"). He also states all the ways it will effect humans, he never seems anything about the environment, such ignorance and species selfishness is disgusting and made me give it one less star.
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