Clayton R. Newell covered the same ground as Mr. Lesser some years ago in his classic "Lee vs. McClellan" but what Mr. Lesser has done in "Rebels at the Gate" is take a fine portrait of the bitter, brother versus brother fighting in the hills of West Virginia and turned it into a landscape. He writes movingly of the Rebel General Garnett, who upon taking the West Virginia assignment to stop the Union forces knew he would die there; of little Josie Gordon, the 18 year son of a Union major, who enlisted in the Union Army much against the wishes of his father, and would be found dead on the battlefield by his heartbroken father.
He also writes of spies, of bushwackers like the deadly Nancy Hart, a little spitfire who killed a Union jailer taking her photo, of the various West Virginia politicians who clamored to 'secede' themselves from the Confederacy, and the figures of history, - Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan, Robert E. Lee, and the sarcastic "bitter" (Ambrose) Bierce, whose Civil War experience, which began in West Virginia, had a profound impact on his future writings.
As a previous reviewer has noted, Lesser has a storyteller's gift, but he also knows his history. A worthy work to place alongside the Newell book, if you can still get a copy.