Reddit reviews Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

> Japan was more the allies then the good old USA

...what? The US had direct occupation and total governmental control of Japan for six years after WW2, and had the largest presence of any of the Allies there for the next several decades. The UK/France were too busy rebuilding their own countries and trying to maintain their control over their colonies to be rebuilding Japan, and Russia would have had to fight the US to try to do so.

Embracing Defeat is a great book about it and about how it transformed Japanese society.

First, textbooks should be less expensive for students. Increasingly university libraries are offering digital copies of textbooks for free to students (they pay a broad license to the publisher), who can read them on their computer or pay $50 to get a copy printed and bound at Kinkos if they want.

But no Reddit or Quora post will ever been a replacement for a good book. The level of detail required to describe difficult material is too much to be read on a website. Those posts that you find useful? They were written by people who... read many books on the subject.

I often referred to a textbook I was assigned my first quarter of graduate school both in subsequent classes and in professional settings. Same goes for a few technical books about coding or methodology. Heck, I still flip through my old Norton Anthology of Poetry from undergrad every now and then.

"Textbook" is also a bit of loose term. It seems like you have in mind broad summaries like a high-school textbook. But plenty of books are just lengthy works of original scholarship that are not available elsewhere and that would not be understood in full if read as a summary. Reading Embracing Defeat, as I did for a Japanese History class, could not be replaced by reading the Wikipedia entry on the occupation of Japan.