A Small Tree in a Texas Hurricane: A Memoir

Robert Henry Benson grew up in the shadow of a state mental asylum in South Texas, where the boundary between the ordinary and the strange was never quite fixed. In the 1950s, rural South Texas had its own relentless curriculum, and like many young people of that era, he left school in the ninth grade not because he lacked ability, but because life simply demanded otherwise. What followed were decades that will feel both foreign and familiar to anyone who came of age in mid-century America. Construction work, a radio repair shop, a bull ride he probably should not have survived, and a chlorine gas accident that had a way of clarifying priorities. Through it all, something kept pulling him forward in directions nobody around him could have predicted. In A Small Tree in a Texas Hurricane, Benson tells his own story in a plainspoken voice, with warmth, humor, and an honest eye for the hardships that shaped him.