I had to stop at page 162. I just couldn't anymore. The chronological whiplash inch makes events difficult to sort in your mind. The bits displaying the Monarchs' division between duty to their respective realms and widespread families were intriguing.

There is heavy presence of Wilhelm compared to the other two monarchs. Each event or anecdote featuring the Kaiser is repetitive. We get it, he was meddlesome. Can we get beyond his random, raging tempers so obviously a byproduct of inbreeding and move the story along?

No, because this book doesn't present a story. Overall, I feel this book fell flat. It did not keep me engaged even though these were genuinely fascinating men. An interesting concept or subject can not make up for poor organization and dull writing. History doesn't have to be written this way.

This book deserves 5 stars. I took one out because of all the editing the book needs. Pronouns, in particular, confused me as to who was talking to whom, for example, repetitions of appositives and typos.
That little annoyance aside, it was a wonderful read and though it's a history book, I noticed that it had a structure quite similar to a novel with a climax and an ending that, to me, came as a surprise.
I loved reading it because it showed how much those three emperors were in denial and willfully distant from the social changes happening in their respective empires. Had they not been involved in a disastrous war, the reading of this book would have flown smoothly, but there were times when this reader secretly believed that the war might be averted if one of those three (particularly the German and the Russian) would have acted in a more modern way (but they were not raised to listen or to think, and the book makes this clear).
I also loved reading about the entourage of those emperors, and how perceptive and smart some were: it's easy for a reader to make correct judgment about people when facts are laid out and historical events are now known, but to be able to draw foreshadowing conclusions. or to be able to pin a person for what this person truly is, this is quite remarkable, and it made reading the book even more pleasant to me.
I'm touching on this point, because some of the generals or ministers or ambassadors who were directly or indirectly involved in that war, didn't really commit evil deeds (for the most of them) as much as they committed errors in judgment, in particular, towards those figures they served. In this panorama of key figures, seen through the eyes of the Kaiser, the King and the Tsar, I experienced the page-turning effect I normally have in fiction.

4.5 stars. G,N,&W was a fantastic book about not just the lives of these three "leaders," but the political climate of Europe at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th and how their megalomania influenced it all. This is one of my favorite time periods, and I was so eager to learn more about Victoria's progeny. It slogged a bit after the Boer War and before Edward's death, but it was a wonderful read all around. A great book.

A solid, if not necessary spectacular, look at the three cousins as rulers and their interactions with each other as such, along with their families of origin and other related matters relevant to their countries entering World War I.

I've read Carter's bio of King Edward as well as mutiple books on Nicholas and his family. I've not read a bio about Wilhelm, but I've read other books such as Gordon Craig's tome about Germany 1866-1945 and a book specifically on the Hindenburg-Ludendorff dictatorship that I didn't enter this unfamiliar.

Basically, it filled in the edges about how both George and Wilhelm reacted against their childhood upbringing in some ways, while Nicholas did no such thing, but bewailed his father dying too young, saying he wasn't ready to be the tsar. Truer words by Nicholas were never spoken.

Other than that, Carter shows that none of the three was close to brilliant intellectually or all that sturdy psychologically. George comes off as somewhat least bad on the intellectual side by default, and somewhat further ahead of both cousins psychologically.

The biggest single thing I learned from this was something I may have seen mentioned in passing in another of my three dozen or more WWI reads, or maybe not. And, that is Carter nothing that already pre-1910, British Foreign Minister Grey was telling one and all in Germany that — without even mentioning Belgium — British neutrality in a continental European war was not guaranteed. Plenty of people besides Wilhelm himself, including the "spider" Holstein, were not listening.

There were several minor errors in this book, not even worthy of note taking, but, altogether, tipped this book away from 4.5 star rating.