THE STANDARD READER

...The answer, unfortunately, is not forthcoming...

...Still, read exclusively for the yarns, the book is fascinating...

...She relies, to a great extent, on a general condemnation of sexism (and, for that matter, racism and slavery) to make her case, painting the old VMI as a bastion of all that is rotten in human history...

...For a book written five years after the integration, it is astonishing that Strum barely touches on the actual problems faced by VMI and its students as a result of the gender integration...

...Philippa Strum's Women in the Barracks is a tale of good versus evil...

...Strum's account is sometimes interesting, as when she describes how Virginia politics shaped the early phases of the battle to integrate the school...

...Now, in The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven, Pelton takes readers through Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Papua New Guinea—which are, he writes, "the three incubators of future wars, where money, technology, and outside ambition are brought to bear against internal social forces...

...Including everything from sociological critiques of all-male military schools as "male bonding rituals" (which craft men solely on the basis of their "otherness" from women) to an enraging yet largely irrelevant narrative of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's struggles against sexism in her early career, Strum depicts Virginia Military Institute's integration as the culmination of a long battle by women against inequality everywhere...

...The question is what we can learn from them, other than each conflict's peculiarities and individual history...

...Pelton is right that each of these represents an "asymmetrical conflict between nonstate players...

...The author of The World's Most Dangerous Places does this for a living...

...Erin Sheley The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven: Journeys to Three Worlds Gone Mad by Robert Young Pelton (Lyons, 320 pp., $24.95...

...It is best to check in with Robert Young Pelton before you visit your next war zone or humanitarian crisis...

...Even without a large conclusion, this is a book filled with information we need to know about how the world goes mad...

...Women in the Barracks has, of course, a happy ending: In a final chapter entitled "The Fife and the Drum, Together at Last," women carry the day, and thirty of them triumphantly matriculate...

...Indeed...

...Under Title IX, VMI could possibly have remained all male and government funded, if the tunnel-visioned administration had not focused so totally on the notions of tradition and history at their own school—and thus done little to aid nearby Mary Baldwin College in creating a similar program for women...

...Even his experiences of waiting are funny, as Pelton has to navigate through the U.N...

...Yet at its heart the book is sheer polemic: "Although change was a six-letter word to most people," she writes, "to the hard-nosed members of the VMI family, it packed all the emotion of a four-letter epithet...

...On the road Pelton hooks up with mercenaries, mujahedeen, international resource tycoons, and xenophobic South Pacific islanders...

...But that, of course, would complicate what is otherwise a simple fairy tale...

...bureaucracy in Sierra Leone, obtain safe passage to Chechnya from gangsters, or wait out dreary days in the former Soviet republic of Georgia with his one-legged friend—all to get in to see forced amputations, Russian bombs, and the complete destruction of a tropical paradise...

...But by comparing the rigors of VMI to the less-harsh systems at West Point and the other American service academies, Strum undercuts her own argument, simultaneously endorsing the right of women to this "unique" experience and decrying it as excessive, unnecessary, and sexist...

...Jason Moll...

...Where the values of culture, life, and land are unrelated to the concepts of money, military power, or privilege...