That's what little boys are made of: a "dangerous" book for adventurous boys--but not girls.

• Author: Young, Cathy

A British import called The Dangerous Book for Boys has been soaring on the American bestseller lists. The book, by the English brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, revels in retro, conjuring up a pre-computer idyll of hunting, skipping stones, making paper airplanes, and heartening tales of battlefield heroics.

The Dangerous Book also expects its readers to be gentlemen; it endorses good manners, cleanliness, and knowledge of Shakespeare and Latin. Many see it as a welcome antidote not only to the narrow and sedentary interests of the digital age but to the safety-obsessed, anti-competitive mind-set of "politically correct" schooling and to feminist scorn for all things male.

But are initiative and adventure "male"? Some people have asked why the same fare could not have been packaged as The Dangerous Book for Kids. The Dangerous Book is even being treated as something of a political manifesto, a repudiation of the idea that boys and girls are basically alike.

Rush Limbaugh has praised it in a rambling rant against "feminazis" who insist that "nobody can be better than anybody else, nobody can be different than anyone else." The book explains, he said, "how to make the best paper airplane in the world, just things that boys do ... for the last 10, 15 years, feminists have tried to wipe 'em out." Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, offered a similar, if more coherent, take in a New York Post column. Sommers praised the book as a "delightfully instructive anachronism" that "valorizes risk, adventure and manliness," a challenge to modern educators steeped in gender neutrality, and a rediscovery of common sense about innate differences between boys and girls, supported by "neuroscientific evidence."

Despite this portrayal of The Dangerous Book as a culture-wars battlefield, it has not prompted any significant backlash. The gender-specific message of the book, which includes a chapter on how to deal with the alien creatures known as girls, is deliberate. But what feminist critiques of the book have appeared don't disparage the "boy" activities the book promotes, but instead argue that girls should be included in the fun as well.

On blogs and other Internet forums, readers complaining about the book's exclusionary message have been dismissed as angry feminist whiners. Yet my friend Dana, who holds no brief for angry feminism or political correctness, notes that "I would have loved this book as a kid, and it really bugs me how...