“Solar History: The Connection of Solar Activity, War, Peace and the Human Mind in the 2nd Millennium”, by Sacha P. Dobler, will change your view of human history and how events in faraway galaxies effect daily life here on earth. The book describes the history of solar maximums and solar minimums and how they appear to affect the incidence of wars and the development of humanity.Solar maximums are characterized by periods of time when the sun has lots of sun spots on its surface and is correlated with global weather that is very stable. The weather stability leads to high crop production and a rapid increase in population. It is also correlated to global leadership by dictators which allegedly cause massive wars, genocides and politically based mass starvation during these times.Solar minimums, in contrast, are periods with very low numbers of sun spots or none at all for decades at a time. Solar minimums are correlated with extremely harsh and unpredictable weather including both severe droughts and floods. Crop production is low, and the population usually shrinks or remains small. Counter-intuitively, the food shortage leads to better leadership and more value placed on human beings. Leaders in solar minimums are cooperative, large wars are rare, and art, literature and humanistic developments flourish.The sun has a solar cycle of about 11 years that effects the number of sun spots, the high point of the cycle having a high count of sun spots and the low part of cycle having a low count. In addition to the constant 11-year cycles, there are other random and much longer time periods known as the solar minimums and maximums. For example, in the Spoerer solar minimum, from 1460 to 1550, there were very few sun spots for 70 years. Those years saw the start of the Italian renaissance, the invention of the printing press and art flourishing in way it had not before.One of the fascinating claims in the book seeks to explain the weather differences created by solar minimums and maximums. Sun spots are related to large emissions from the sun's surface which creates a solar wind that blows through the solar system and beyond. During solar maximums, these solar winds slow down or stop something known as relativistic protons. Relativist protons travel at near the speed of light and are said to come from outside the solar system or even our galaxy.In solar minimums with no solar winds, the relativistic protons penetrate the earth's atmosphere and break into sub atomic particles as they hit atoms in the atmosphere. These sub atomic particles (mostly muons) cause rapid cloud formation which blocks solar absorption and reduces the earth's surface temperature and increases flooding. This increased cloud formation and flooding reduces the humidity in the atmosphere and the lower humidity reduces the solar heat retained by the earth atmosphere. Low atmospheric humidity also causes longer more damaging droughts and lower food production.Additionally, during solar minimums, the high energy particles penetrate the earth’s crust and deposit staggering amounts of energy in the earth's crust. This energy builds up and causes epic volcanic eruptions towards the end of long solar minimums. The ash and gases from the mega eruptions block the sun causing even more cooling of the planet surface and further reducing crop production.Many of the claims about cosmic rays and how they interact with the atmosphere in the book contradicted my understandings from high school and college. So, I checked all the citations listed in the back and was amazed to find that the author’s claims were recently verified by scientific studies. I highly recommend this book, five stars.