David --

How strange! I had the same experience with this tome, and the same opinion. It hadn't been given away (yet), but Monaghan had been consigned to to my book purgatory. Now I'll have organize a search mission and attempt to locate the right box in the basement.

Sometimes the best titles aren't the ones everyone recognizes. Still, everything has its place. A non-historian leaving on a long trip might consider "The Civil War on the Western Border" as a good travel companion.

So you can't get a reading on modern-day observers. Allow me a few words to assist you here. As the late Jim Morrison once sang, 'People are Strange'.