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.