In Rebel, Kevin H. Siepel has written the fullest biography of the celebrated Confederate partisan leader John S. Mosby that we are likely to get. The guerrilla warfare that radiated from ‘Mosby’s Confederacy’ is recounted here skillfully and without overdramatization. What Siepel has achieved in addition is the documentation of Mosby’s long, colorful, and often paradoxical postwar career. Rebel is a well chosen title, for Mosby was surely one of the more cross-grained individualists of 19th-century America. It is Mosby the Civil War partisan, however, that still catches the eye. He did no harm to his legend in two works of memoirs written late in life, but Siepel has used them judiciously and cross-checked against contemporary sources to trace Mosby's successes (and occasional failures) without romantic gloss. Rebel leaves no doubt that as a partisan leader John Singleton Mosby had no peer.