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“Thomas Dean's beautifully written memoir is a moving journey through the author's personal life and its continual relationship to the landscape he accepts and honors. Dean's clear obsession with weather blends gracefully with his equal concern for family. The book is, finally, a testament to living fully, accepting both the pain and beauty of one's daily life against a Midwest landscape that is often a major player.”
—Jim Heynen, Sunday Afternoon on the Porch: Reflections of a Small Town in Iowa, 1939-1942
“Under a Midland Sky considers Dean’s passion for the Midwestern weather patterns and natural cycles that have punctuated and patterned his own life’s progression. Here he celebrates the immensity of the Iowa skies, including those atmospheric miracles that have drawn him into deeper knowledge of self even as they planted him firmly within the larger creation. In describing his personal nature-related search for ‘coherent life connected to place,’ Dean draws us closer to a rooted sense of home and community that is at the base of all yearning.”
—Cornelia F. Mutel, The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa
“Thomas Dean's essays offer an insightful, sky-high portrait of the Midwest, and a moving personal story of embracing family and place as ‘the most powerful sources of life orientation.’”
—John T. Price, Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships
“Contrary to the notion that earlier Midwestern meteorologist Robert Zimmerman promoted, Thomas Dean is indeed the weatherman you need to know to know which way the wind blows. Throughout the open prairie and the endless plains, Under a Midland Sky is a cogent, crystalline, severely clear accounting of this all-encompassing, aforementioned placeless place. Dean writes with gusts of gusto, fronts of high pressure, heaps of heart.”
—Michael Martone, Racing in Place and The Flatness and Other Landscapes
“Thomas Dean’s collection of essays reveals more than a casual knowledge of his subject. He describes the weather of the Middle West in all of its variation—the depth of the snow, the height of the flood, the exact time the tornado hit. He recalls the summer showers and the impossible blueness of the autumn sky.”
—Patrick Irelan, Central Standard and A Firefly In The Night
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