Though the structure of Ms. Carter's biography has nothing of inventiveness or uniqueness about it, her deft hand with historical subjects, and her choice of topics, mark out this effort as a worthy read. It could stand to be shorter by a hundred pages, but the portrait it paints of three men jostling one another at a vital pivot point in history makes up for the longwindedness typical of historians and their histories.
George, Nicholas And Wilhelm is a well-researched history of the men who ruled Germany, Russia and England at the dawn of the First World War. Related through queen Victoria of England, King George, Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas were royal cousins, inheritors of problematic and idealistic nations naive to the horrors of the 20th century, horrors which would do their level best to drown their three nations in blood and death. Unable to imagine such a calamitous slaughter, the cousins indulge in rivalry and hurt feelings, sparking what ought to have been a perfectly controllable diplomatic situation into a war for the world, a war that re-shaped Europe, a war which succeeded in killing millions without achieving a lasting peace. That folly successfully drapes over this chronicle like a dark cloud, ready to open up and rain doom down upon the proud men who allowed their pricked pride to guide them towards ruin.
As much as Ms. Carter infuses her tale with a deep sense of foreboding, she does not forsake the history. Clear and grim sketches of each of the three superpowers is etched out in thorough detail: the hyper-militarism of Germany, the mercantile aristocracy of England and the bubbling caldron of discontent that is always Russia. Each land is ill-served by the cousin entrusted with its care and protection. But equally so, each cousin is so clearly a puppet for the greater forces at play within their realms, relics of a passing, autocratic age which have been left to linger too long. Ms. Carter does a wonderful job describing the family from which the cousins come. She paints their eccentricities, their fears, their passions, their lonelinesses. It's an effort that not only succeeds in educating the reader on a poorly remembered time, it exemplifies the folly of monarchical rule. And the global disasters that can result from overweening pride.
this is a lovely but somewhat plodding work. King George is easily the weakest of the portrayed royals, but Wilhelm and Nicholas, in their pride, and their mistakes, animate from their pages as, deeply, the institutionalized products of a thankfully dead time. (3/5 Stars))
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