Kenneth Steuer's study chronicles the efforts of the YMCA to provide POWs in Central Power countries with programming and services that would make incarceration not only more bearable in the short term, but that would also be of use when World War I was over. Association officials therefore provided religious items, sports equipment, sheet music and instruments, and reading material, and they organized classes that ranged from basic literacy to vocational training, and from occupational therapy to credit-bearing university courses. Before the Association could provide these things, however, it had to gain access to the camps, and that proved to be a significant challenge. Association success along these lines was the result of various governments' willingness to accept the principle of reciprocity regarding camp conditions and, more importantly, as a result of the personal diplomacy of a handful of Association leaders.

In demonstrating the role of individuals as unofficial diplomatic agents, Kenneth Steuer's study achieves its greatest success: The relationships that made Association work with POWs possible are clearly visible. John Raleigh Mott, the head of the American YMCA, was a close friend of President Woodrow Wilson and was thus able to secure official support for the Association's efforts early in the war. In Germany, Archibald Harte was able to draw on prewar connections in the missionary community—including Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg's sister—to gain access to officials in the Foreign Office and Ministry of War and on the chancellor's staff. Harte also traveled to Russia and other European countries to work out the reciprocity agreements that allowed the Association to begin its relief work. Once Association work was established in Germany, the long-serving secretary Conrad Hoffman continued to build personal networks that served him—and the POWs—extremely well; he was even allowed to stay and continue working after the United States entered the war in April 1917. In Austria-Hungary, a productive relationship among Association personnel, the staff of the U.S. embassy, and Archduke Franz Salvator gave the Association broad access to POWs.

Indeed, the Association received its warmest welcome in Austria-Hungary. The Association's prewar presence in Austria-Hungary dated from 1873 and was not particularly large. It appears to have been organized along national lines, and so it had more of a spotty local presence than a powerful empire-wide reach. Christian Phildius, the general secretary of the World's Alliance incarnation of the Association, came from his Geneva office to conduct the negotiations for wartime POW work. The Association quickly came under scrutiny from Catholic authorities who feared Protestant proselytizing, but investigations by the bishop of Vienna and others quickly revealed that the organization was not pursuing wartime conversions, and protests stopped. Association secretaries first gained access to POW camps in Braunau-in-Böhmen and Sopronnyék, and after successes there were allowed to expand into thirty-two more camps, out of a total of fifty. Association secretaries working in Austria-Hungary tended to have led dramatically transnational lives, and they spoke, at minimum, German, Russian, and English, so they could communicate with guards, prisoners, and the organization.

Steuer's study is part of the Gutenberg-e Project, a joint venture by the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press aiming to present historical scholarship online. The hard copy book contains the main text—twenty chapters including introduction and conclusion—and bibliography, while the open access Web site includes these materials, plus biographical sketches of Association secretaries and dozens of photographs, along with maps and audio files. The photographs and other media certainly could not be included in a reasonably priced book, and in that regard they make the online element worthwhile. More challenging, however, is the task of producing a text that works both as a traditional book and as a Web text, in which readers can enter the text at a variety of points and where, I presume, the expectation that they will read the whole thing is considerably lower. Steuer's account tends toward detail and repetition, rather than a linear argument, and the significance of many of the details is not clear. The text's organization is chronological and geographic; a thematic organization may have been more effective.

Most troublesome, though, is the absence of a thorough discussion of sources and methodology. Steuer's research is based on the YMCA collections at the University of Minnesota and in Geneva, Switzerland, as well as the Mott papers at Yale, and the primary source bibliography he provides is excellent. He mentions in multiple places that the Association reports on camp conditions were deliberately positive so as to allow continued Association access, and we learn in passing in the conclusion that the U.S. Senate conducted an inquiry into Association activities after the war and criticized those reports. Steuer does not provide us with information on how he approached these problematic sources, however. There is also a relative absence of quotations in the book; we get very little sense of how Association employees expressed themselves and almost nothing from the POWs themselves. These may be limitations of the source base itself, but if so, that is certainly worthy of discussion in the text.