The D-day landings - the fate of 2.5 million men, 3000 landing craft and the entire future of Europe depends on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing on an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? And what is the relationship between predictability and turbulence, one of the last great mysteries of modern physics? Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this - but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Mark Latchford, a young maths prodigy from the Met Office, is sent to Scotland to discover Ryman's system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined and events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.
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Book Description
From Giles Foden, prize-winning author of The Last King of Scotland, a gripping blend of fact and fiction in a novel about the D-Day landings.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Giles Foden, who grew up in Africa, was for three years an assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement and then joined the staff of the Guardian. In 1998 Foden won the Whitbread First Novel Award for the Last King of Scotland, which was followed in 1999 by Ladysmith - two novels which, according to Alan Massie writing in the Scotsman, 'establish him as the most original and interesting novelist of his generation'.
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23 of 37 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed
3 Aug 2009
By Gene P.
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As an Air Force meteorologist and someone who knew some of the participants in D-Day weather forecasting, I was looking forward to reading TURBULENCE. Unfortunately, I was disappointed on several counts. First, the story line is slow, especially early on, and the characters are weak. Second, and most important, the science is wrong. And the incorrect science ruins the plot. For example, there is no such thing as a Ryman number, and the effects of turbulence, while real, do not exhibit themselves in the way Foden presents them. That means the whole line about the "Ryman effect" that winds throught the story isn't true. It would have been relatively easy to get the science right. A better approach would have centered on the Lorenz effect also called the butterfly effect. (If a butterfly flaps its wings in the U.S., does it eventually affect the weather in Russia?) All is not totally lost. Foden did get the interplay right between the various strong personalities in the several weather centers that collaborated on the D-Day forecast. He also got it right about the dramatic interplay between the weather team and the senior officers responsible for D-Day. On that level and in that limited way the book is OK. So,for several reasons, I would recommend this book only to those who like Foden's works generally and aren't too concerned about getting the science correct or the relatively weak story line early on.
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