Maybe it was reading it on the Kindle, but I was really disappointed in this book. It had a great review in the New York Times and looked like a really good treatment of what was portrayed as a "more important than you'd have thought" subject. It started out with a pretty interesting explanation of the origins of the war as an attempt by Russia to preserve and enhance Orthodox access to the holy sites in Palestine, specifically the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, both under Ottoman control. Well coincidentally I was reading this book exactly while we were visiting these sites, so hearing that in 1844 or thereabouts dozens of people were killed inside the Holy Sepulchre in a fight over whose altar cloth was going to be used in the Calvary chapel on Good Friday (seriously - and that wasn't uncommon) was of some interest to me.
Unfortunately the book ended up a long, long monotonous reciting of every conceivable reference for every point. For example it would get on the czar or Napoleon III's motivation to do X, or some detail of life in the trenches and would through page after page after page of evidence in the historical record supporting that. The point was made pages previously - this became like an index of Crimean War reference material. The only subject that received (comparatively) short shrift was the one thing people know about the war - the Charge of the Light Brigade. And as best I could tell, it turns out that the charge was no more of a mistake than anything else that was going on, and it actually was relatively successful, and no more costly in terms of losses than most of what else was going on. Weird.
In the end, this was one of those books I really didn't want to read by the time I finished. I would like to know more about the Light Brigade, and the one point where this book might be useful is in setting the scene for that. You probably do need to know that there were precious few instances of anything being done right on either side, especially at the outset of the war, and this book might provide that in a way that an account specifically directed at that battle might not. Essentially, if anything was done right, it was by sheer chance, so the drama of a mistaken order to attack is a bit exaggerated. That actually happened frequently - there's one specific time the book recounts of such a mistake - and the cost in terms of infantry killed as a result dwarfed the Light Brigade's casualties. The book does do a service by noting that the extreme mismanagement of the war effort playing a major role in professionalizing the armies involved. For example, it England it began eliminating the practice of purchasing commissions and and began modernizing the army, which during most of the war was commanded by a Napoleonic War veteran (a former aide to Wellington) who had the disturbing tendency to refer to the enemy as "the French". Actually the enemy was the Russians and the French were his allies - who were providing by far the most and the best trained soldiers in the conflict - so it's actually surprising that the allies didn't have more problems along these lines.
The war bears a lot of similarities to the American Civil War that followed it by a few years, although the scale was vastly different - and of course ours took far longer.