Culture

Book Review: ‘Somewhere Toward Freedom,’ by Bennett Parten

Published

1 year ago

January 20, 2025

Book Review: ‘Somewhere Toward Freedom,’ by Bennett Parten

Drawing extensively on Willie Lee Rose’s “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” an influential chronicle of the Union’s early and mixed efforts to assist freed Black Americans, Parten argues that “what came after the march was as much a crucible, as much an ordeal, as the march itself.” Though Sherman triumphantly entered Savannah in December, most of the refugees never entered the city. Instead, they were sent up the coast to Port Royal, the Union outpost on the coast of South Carolina where about 15,000 freed people lived alongside Northerners who had migrated south to serve as educators and missionaries.

There, Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, the military governor of the Department of the South, had been ordered to take possession of all plantations previously occupied by rebels and to feed, shelter and generally care for the formerly enslaved. But as 17,000 Georgian refugees arrived, many had to be housed in rough tents, or they slept outdoors, often without blankets. At least 1,000 of them died of exposure.

In this, the second and somewhat more derivative half of his book, which is less about the march than about its aftermath, Parten largely focuses on how the “hopes and failures” of the march persisted, particularly when Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in Savannah, met with Garrison Frazier, a formerly enslaved pastor, who told them, “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” Sherman’s subsequent Special Field Order No. 15 allowed freed men and women to settle on a strip of captured land that stretched from Charleston down to Jacksonville, under a provision that came to be known colloquially as “40 acres and a mule.”

Men like Edward Philbrick, one of the Northerners who came to Georgia’s Sea Islands with humanitarian intentions, purchased 11 plantations in the strip, arrogantly assuming that by employing freed people on his property, he would bring about their “elevation.” As Parten rightly observes, Philbrick represents those capitalists who wanted “to reshape the slaveholding South in the image of the North,” with its highhanded, paternalistic privatization of land.

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Culture

Can You Name These Novels Based on Their Characters?

Published

5 days ago

April 6, 2026

Press Room

Can You Name These Novels Based on Their Characters?

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge asks you to identify a novel’s title based on the characters in the text. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.

Culture

Do You Know Where These Famous Authors Are Buried?

Published

2 weeks ago

March 30, 2026

Press Room

Do You Know Where These Famous Authors Are Buried?

A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself — or have a lasting influence on an author. With that in mind, this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the final stops for five authors after a life of writing. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.

Culture

What Happens When We Die? This Wallace Stevens Poem Has Thoughts.

Published

2 weeks ago

March 25, 2026

Press Room

What Happens When We Die? This Wallace Stevens Poem Has Thoughts.

By A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for the Book Review. Aliza Aufrichtig is a visual journalist.

March 25, 2026

Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.

Now&colon; What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?

Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.

Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.

Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.

Wallace Stevens in 1950.

Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Shutterstock

As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.

Are those worlds real?

Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.

Until then, we find consolation in fangles.