"King, Kaiser, Tsar" gives a fascinating, up-close and personal look at George V of Great Britain, Wilhelm II of Germany and Nicholas II of Russia and the key roles they played in the 30-odd years that led up to World War I. Especially enthralling are the differences between the responsibilities and personalities of a constitutional monarch, an autocrat in an empire with a parliament but little real democracy, and an absolute monarch totally unsuited for his role.
Catrine Clay quotes voluminously from family letters and other sources concerning King George and Tsar Nicholas, showing how the complex intertwining of relationships among the children and grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made statesmanship and diplomacy a family affair as well as a national one in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Where Clay's otherwise fine book falls short is in her biased and very negative treatment of Kaiser Wilhelm. Her English roots are painfully apparent every time she talks of him, with many negative comments, few positive, and almost none of the humanizing quotes from family letters she gives from the lives of the other two monarchs. Clay's noting of Wilhelm's birth trauma and the lifelong problems his withered arm and other disabilities caused him does not make up for her one-sided treatment of his life, taken as a whole.
Nevertheless, the book as a whole is well worth a read for those who want to learn what European life was like in the days when monarchs still counted for something.

Other reviews have pretty much covered the content and general scope of the book -- a very interesting, fairly detailed (as much as the broad subject matter and limited page count will allow) biography of 3 rulers and the way they were influenced by their world, and influenced the world around them. While very critical of Wilhelm, she is also fairly sympathetic, portraying him as a man who was often 'left out', due to factors largely beyond his control.

While overall it was very well written, the structure of the text led to a few minor issues.

a) Because it covers three people, the content isn't always chronological, leading to some confusion, and occassional repetition of facts and incidents.

b)Some of the repetition got rather annoying. (The author reminds us about 20 times that George was a constitutional monarch [and therefore required to follow the demands of parliament], while Nicky and Willie were absolute monarchs.

c) More pictures would have been nice, as well as a more detailed family-tree. (Many people mentioned in the text are not included in the tree. The extremely complex interrationship between the various royal families would have made a more detailed chart very helpful.)