I pay to get reports from George Friedman's thinktank. They send me about eight emails a day. It's a commitment but it's usually thought-provoking. Once a week they send out a "what we're reading."

Last week, the three books on their list were the three books I had most recently read.

I've talked about Toland's Rising Sun before. b_b - we've discussed Hiroshima. After Rising Sun and Japan 1941 I have even less sympathy for the "no nukes" standpoint. Japan suffered strategic and tactical defeat in every conflict after Pearl Harbor and still fought tooth and claw because surrender was dishonorable. The military faction undertook an armed coup to depose the emperor after Nagasaki. Upon reading Toland, there is no responsible way to regard Japan as a rational actor and ample evidence that the only way forward was to utterly break them as a nationality. We stopped at two because they surrendered unconditionally. We could have gone to five before needing to build more bombs. There were Russian considerations to be sure but the principle drive on the American side was to end the war - we talked about the firebombing of Tokyo but we haven't talked about how it was diplomatically ineffective.

The other two books discussed were Books 1 and 2 of Ken Follett's Century Trilogy. It's easy, it's fluffy, it's accessible, it's Downton Abbey writ large across WWs I and II from the perspectives of British aristocracy, German aristocracy, Russian peasants, Welsh coal miners and American businessmen.

Follett knows how to write page-turners that don't leave you feeling stupid. They don't leave you feeling smart, either - they leave you feeling like you were there.