Hall takes us from Texas to Vietnam and back again, treating us over and over to exquisite evocations of place. We get lost in the East Texas Big Thicket, with its mosquitoes, sloughs, feral hogs, armadillos, and carnivorous plants, and wind up enjoying the pollution-enhanced beauty of a sunset. In Vietnam we sit with Hall on his berm, watch napalm explosions, and drink Chianti on Christmas. We meet local people with whom, as an interpreter, Hall can converse in Vietnamese. Stateside, we go on road trips in Mustang and Volkswagen convertibles and end up at a hilarious high school reunion, on...

In Into the Thicket, H. Palmer Hall, reminds us that an East Texas pine tree blown over by a storm simply clears the land for seedlings that follow, that the crunch of Gulf oyster shells under your boots beckons you back to the ocean, that sometimes you have to rub the bark of an oak tree to get under someone's skin. From the Neches to the Rio Grande to Tigris River, Hall's stories confirm the collective identity between man and woman and beast and soil, blurring time and space and life and death with his poetic pen.