Thomas Fleming?s The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, definitely presented a different perspective on America?s involvement in World War I than I had ever read before.  To be perfectly honest, I have not studied much about the American homefront in the First World War.  This book provided me with some insight into the forces at work in the United States prior to and during the American involvement in the war.  I found Fleming?s work to be fairly easy to read although he takes a caustic tone throughout the book.  This tone made it hard for me to read the book because I like writers to lay their positions out as well as the facts but leave it to me to decide what I think the correct interpretation is.  I found Mr. Flemings writing style to be arrogant and condescending which definitely affected my enjoyment of the book as well as the seriousness with which I took his contentions.It is obvious from the beginning of the book that Mr. Fleming has a strong opinion about both the quality of President Wilson?s leadership and Wilson?s motivation, of which neither opinion is high. One of the things I disliked the most about the book was the way in which Mr. Fleming constantly denigrates just about everything Woodrow Wilson said or did while in office as well as Wilson?s wife Edith Galt Wilson.  The author scarcely conceal the fact that he thought Wilson was continually manipulated by his wife and that she should have been relegated to the living quarters of the White House.  Fleming seems to assume that anyone reading his book will automatically agree with his conclusions.  He takes a very arrogant tone throughout as though the conclusions he draws are the only ones possible and anyone who thinks different is either mistaken, misinformed, or is lacking in logical reasoning ability. The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I is well researched and extremely well documented.  It is obvious from reading the copious endnotes that Mr. Fleming did extensive research while writing the book.  However, it is also obvious that he only provides evidence that supports his thesis and while he does not completely ignore views contrary to his, he definitely minimizes them.  His argument about the nature of Americas decision for and prosecution of the war would be more convincing if he showed that dissenting viewpoints and interpretations were not well-reasoned.  He also points out the essential hypocrisy of Wilson?s 1916 campaign slogan ?He kept us out of the war?, which many historians only mention in passing if at all. I did gain a greater understanding of the role that propaganda played in forming American opinion about the nation?s entry into the war.  I had always assumed that newspapers played the same role in whipping up support for the war in America as they did in England, but I was not aware that there was a government agency coordinating the effort.  I was also not aware of the extent to which such laws as the Sedition Act of 1918 and Espionage Act of 1917 were used to silence critics of the war.  I should not have been surprised that such things happen especially given the current situation in America and some of the efforts of the current administration to suppress dissent. Perhaps the most important insight I gained from the book was the extent of anti-war feeling in America.  Mr. Fleming makes an excellent case that American support for the war was not as monolithic as many works make it appear.  There was very real dissent and disagreement about both American involvement in the war and also any peace following the war.  He also makes it clear that the American decision to support the intervention in Russia was ill conceived and little debated.  His contention about intervention is backed up quite well and subsequent history has proven that his analysis that America achieved nothing and probably made the situation in Russia worse by its intervention has been proven correct. Perhaps the best way in which the book could have been improved is if Mr. Fleming had presented a more account of events instead of continually asserting his own analysis and interpretation while virtually ignoring any other points of view.  He could have been less insistent in portraying Wilson as a fool, and an idealistic fool at that.  It is quite clear throughout that the author has a very low opinion of President Wilson.  Practically every sentence in which Wilson is mentioned positively drips with the disdain and contempt in which Mr. Fleming holds the president and those around him.  This continual bias detract from the work and caused me to lend less weight to what are otherwise strong arguments supported by voluminous evidence. Most histories of the First World War I have read tend to agree with Mr. Fleming?s interpretation of the reasons behind Americas entry into the war namely, that Wilson wanted a say in the peace, if not his judgment of whether that was a sufficient reason for going to war in the first place.  Fleming presents a fairly cynical but typical view of Wilson and his wife Edith.  He makes Wilson out to be a fool and his wife out to be a manipulative power hungry witch who capitalizes on her husband?s illness to exert undue and possibly illegal influence on the President?s Cabinet and thus the government.  I am not familiar enough with the details to make a competent judgment on Fleming?s characterization of the first family, but I do feel that he is unnecessarily harsh in his judgment of Wilson?s motivations.  Fleming presents President Wilson as a power hungry academic idealist with no practical experience trying to force the world into fitting his vision.  I do not think this is entirely correct.  Certainly, Wilson was an idealist but there is little evidence to show him as power hungry.  Wilson strikes me more as one of those types of people who just naturally assume they know better what is right than others.  He pursued his idealistic agenda not out of a quest for power but because he honestly thought he knew the correct answer to the world?s problems, and he was simply constitutionally incapable of seeing things realistically.  This idealism was the source of his friction with the European heads of state, they were realistic where he was idealistic, and his idealism led him to reject compromise until the only way he could get even part of what he wanted was to throw some parts of his agenda overboard.  His idealism also led him to distrust the advice of career diplomats at Versailles.  If he had, it is entirely possible that he would have achieved more of his vision than he ultimately did. In sum, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, is a good well researched book, but the authors obvious bias detracts from his interpretation if events.  If Fleming had presented a more balanced view of events, I would have given more weight to his point of view.  However, because of his bias I tend to discount the more extreme of his views and take just about everything he writes with a grain of salt.  He does not strike me as being even the slightest bit impartial and because of this, I will probably not read any of his other works.