Starting from the premise that "we shall lose the war unless we clear out of our minds several fundamental illusions which are minimizing our effort," James Reston's "Prelude to Victory" strikes at the manifold weaknesses of the American public's participation in the war. Essentially a study of morale, the book is seldom guilty of the looseness implied by its subject, for Reston attacks sloppy thinking only where he can prove it clearly responsible for specific failures in the war effort.

The short-sighted policies of the last twenty-five years are blamed upon the general public, who have forced their government to continue "sparring with the situation until the American people are ready to face the facts--the bare distasteful facts." This tendency to evade the issue and to seek the easy way out is, for Reston, the greatest threat to a United Nation victory, and he devotes the book to dispelling this threat. Facts contained in chapters like "The Illusion that Time and Money Will Save Us" are ably used to dissipate mental mists, and the reader, given easily digestible figures on shipping losses and the length of transportation lines, suddenly realizes that the Allies lost their time advantages, with their bases, after Pearl Harbor.

Other chapters puncture other illusions. Labor and management, Congress and citizen, all come in for their share of praise and blame. "The Illusion that We Can Win the War with Our Second Team" convincingly indicts an unconverted administrative system still crippled by peacetime policies and personnel, while "The Illusion that Britain and Russia Are the Enemy" is a summons to the abandonment of irresponsible criticism of our Allies.

Reston is most at home in the field of War Information and it is in "The Illusion that the Facts will Speak for Themselves" that his analysis is most acute. Many of the author's other themes are integrated here as Reston calls, not for more news, but for clearer interpretation of what is available. Figures are meaningless until they are broken down and their significance explained, and news services have so far ignored this portion of their responsibility. In this failure lie the roots of many of the illusions at which Reston strikes. "Prelude to Victory" is, in itself a graphic illustration of the type of interpretation needed.