Digging into Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is a bit like getting cross examined. She's constantly bringing up everyone's strengths and failings and presenting them to you as both witness and jury.
Starting with the 1910 funeral of Edward VII, we see how interbred early 20th century European royalty actually is, and how cut off Germany feels from its European contemporaries. ( I mean, the war that ended up uniting the Germans into Germany was roughly 30 years earlier and had ended in a march on Paris that rather annoyed the French.) From there, we see the Triple Alliance form, with German, Austria-Hungary, and Italy form a mutual defense pact, while the Triple Entente sort of united Russia, Britain, and France. (When war actually breaks out, Italy refuses to join what become the Central Powers because Austria-Hungary started things with aggression. Russia mobilizes, but really doesn't do much beyond failing to properly do much of anything other than fail in invading Germany. They did rather well in other fronts, before signing a separate peace after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar in 1917...)
Anyway, Tuchman is mostly concerned with Germany, France, and Britain, with a bit about the invasions of Luxembourg and Belgium discussed as the various war machines gear up in August 1914, following whatever plan their military had mapped out in the period between wars. In Germany's case, that would be the Schlieffen Plan, which concentrated mostly on sweeping through Belgium and enveloping France from the North. For France, that would be Plan 17, which wasn't so much a plan as much as it was "We will take back Alsace-Lorraine and head to Berlin with élan et outré with a side of cran!"
Britain, on the other hand, really didn't want to get involved. Indeed, they spend most of August complaining, and it takes a heck of a lot of complaining to get their two Armies into the Battle of the Marne.
Anyway, since most of this is available in a more concise format elsewhere, Germany gets within 40 miles of Paris before a few factors end up allowing the Allies to make a stand that ends in 4 years of wet trenches, mustard gas, and nothing happening on the Western Front. (Indeed. if you have insomnia, allow me to suggest All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, which by the time the narrator dies, you'll swear you already did 100 pages ago.)
What makes Tuchman a more fascinating read than the surveys of The Great War is her ability to dig in to the personalities commanding all the belligerents in the conflict, from the Kaiser, to Sir John French (who wants France to leave him a path to the channel to escape), to Papa Joffre who ends up doing what ends up being the right thing by firing the one general who actually sees the conflict as it is, rather than through Nationalistic ideals that got the whole thing started.
Heck, we even get a chapter on Woodrow Wilson and why the Americans didn't enter until 1917, which, unlike the isolationism and adherence to the Monroe Doctrine that delayed entry into the sequel, instead involved Wilson's desire to play peacemaker, British blockades of the continent creating similar issues to the ones that set off the War of 1812 (which we tend to gloss over the fact Britain was a bit busy with Napoleon at the time), and a much less integrated German ethnicity in the States that rallied against joining the allies at the outset. (This was a bit odd for me, since the late 20th century seems to have fulfilled the Melting Pot to the degree that we judge based on skin color more than where our families immigrated from.)
Was it worth reading? Yes. It's a must read for anyone looking for information on the bigger belligerents in World War I. If you're wanting to know about the entire war, though, there are better resources out there that go more in depth into everything else going on and the other fronts of the conflict.
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