Quite a detailed history of the events leading to WWI. I did enjoy the audiobook version!

This richly deserves its reputation as a masterpiece of historical research and writing. Clark marshals a dizzying array of names, factors, decisions, and acts that lead to the most senseless war in modern times. He also does a brilliant job debunking so, so many of the old myths about how World War I started and who was culpable. The main things to pull from this, aside from the feeling of looking at something vastly far away and yet eerily close when discussing fin de siecle European politics, is that the people in charge could not fully understand their enemies and allies and completely failed to appreciate what their decisions could lead to.

The madhouse of Serbian politics provided the spark, but the leaders of Europe burned their own house down. That's a sobering thought as an American in 2017.

In my opinion it was too long and detailed. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't even touch on the war itself, and I could have used a summarising conclusion at the end to outline the main events described in the book. But then again, I can't really blame a book that intents to describe why WW1 stated for only described the cause and not the war itself. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in understanding why WW1 happened and the multipolar interaction among states from 1890-1914.

This history of the events leading up to World War I was fascinating. The author does not attempt to assign blame to any one country or person. Instead, the focus is on the individual decision makers whose collective choices brought about the terrible result. Specifically, what did they want and why did they want it, what did they believe and why did they believe it? The resulting picture is one of relatively rational choices which, taken together, produced a horrifically tragic result that no one wanted or anticipated.

I found this book to be extremely interesting, but far too detailed for my purposes. It's a legitimate historical tome.

The whole book could be summarized as "Nobody knew who was in charge, the people who made decisions were not qualified. It was a mess." But I'm glad a read it. Both high school and college history classes skipped over WWI and I've always wondered what it was about.

Impeccably researched, incredibly detailed and unbelievably dense. Tough plowing.