I'll read just about anything about the Civil War except Ph.D. theses, but the political agenda, constant repetition, and lack of significant detail make THEY FOUGHT LIKE DEMONS awfully tough sledding.

The introduction and chapter one are about as readable as the phone book. I almost gave up. Chapter two is a little better because Blanton and Cook introduce us to such stalwarts as Sarah Emma Edmonds, Albert D. J. Cashier, and Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, for whom they have extensive information. Edmonds wrote a best-selling memoir after the war; Cashier, who dressed as a man prior to the war, served out her entire enlistment without being discovered until she was sent to a mental hospital as an old "man," and Wakeman's letters to her family were preserved. The most entertaining of the three is the feisty Wakeman, who gets into a fight with a fellow soldier and wins. A picture section lets of decide for ourselves whether these women could possibly pass for men.

Rather than rely on the letters, memoirs and newspaper accounts they unearthed, Blanton and Cook spend much of the book dispelling such notions that most women who fought in the Civil War were lesbians, prostitutes or camp followers. They maintain that most of the women fought for the same reasons men did: for the money, for adventure and because of patriotism. But only 240 women can be proved to have served, most under aliases which were almost impossible to track. Blanton and Cook use a sample of 153. From this number they arrive at some rather suspect statistics. Forty-four percent were casualties; eighteen percent were captured by the enemy; their promotion rate was eighteen percent, better than the ten percent cited for men. We're talking over two million men here; I doubt a statistician would allow this sort of comparison.

Some chapters are rather funny. Take Chapter seven: "A Congenital Peculiarity," Women Discovered in the Ranks. Two were detected when an officer threw apples at them; they were in uniform but reflexively tried to catch them with their non-existent aprons. Another was discovered because of her feminine method of putting on her stockings.

There are certainly better Civil War books out there: CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC by Tony Horwitz and SLAVES IN THE FAMILY by Edward Ball to name two.

Dave Schwinghammer's Fargo-esque literary mystery, Soldier's Gap, can be found on Authors-den and Amazon.com, new and used.