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.