Don't get the low ratings here.

Surprisingly good for being a non-academic, or even quasi-academic book. Gets more beyond the Versailles tables in some ways than MacMillan's "Paris 1919," especially on the Arab world and in the Balkans. The latter, especially, is its strongest area. Andelman looks at each tidbit and sliver of land battled over by Poland and Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria vs Yugoslavia, Romania vs Hungary, etc. One of the maps at the end focuses on this.

On the Arab world, he notes the British didn't pay enough attention to Henry St. John Philby's tout of the House of Saud and so, and not just in terms of oil, backed the wrong horse.

Besides Ho Chi Minh, whose full story I already knew, Chinese pleas get at least a look, as do Japanese machinations.

Andelman tries to draw lessons for Bush-era Iraq War and other things that leave this book dated in some ways. That said, contra some lesser reviewers, as I understand him in the Arab world of a century ago, he was arguing for religious divisions, but yet within a larger confederation. (I wonder how many of these reviewers still have a romanticized view of Feisal.)

I also never before knew that the Dulles brothers were nephews of Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing.