Non-Fiction

Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless

A collection of twelve fascinating essays that weave together nature, history, and science. Shelter and Storm invites readers to step into Wisconsin's magical Driftless Area and consider how we tend the earth in times of uncertainty, what we owe our neighbors, and ways we thrive in community.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls Shelter and Storm "generous and self-aware," "a love letter to the joys and griefs of living on the land," and "a revelatory study of person and place, entwined."

The Progressive named Shelter and Storm one of its favorite books of 2025 and called it "A delightful book that bears comparison to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."

Yale Climate Connections named Shelter and Storm a must-read title on climate change for the summer of 2025.

Poets & Writers magazine listed Shelter and Storm among its top 12 new titles released in spring 2025.

Wisconsin Public Radio featured Shelter and Storm on its Chapter A Day program, adding: "[Dean's] for storytelling unites personal experience with science and history, presenting a perspective as informative as it is compelling. “‘The Land Remembers’ for the 21st century”."

Shelf Awareness calls Shelter and Storm "luminous."

Award-winning author Jane Hamilton writes, "Dean writes with a clarity and wisdom that illuminates the past, the present, and the future. Shelter and Storm is an essential book for our time."

Living mindfully with nature during a time of uncertainty
In the midst of the environmental crises of the early twenty-first century, Tamara Dean sought a way to live lightly on the planet. Her quest drew her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There, she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change—an experience at once soul-stirring and practical that she recounts in Shelter and Storm. 

Dean’s boundless curiosity and gift for storytelling imbue these essays with urgency and a sense of adventure. She invites readers to share in her discoveries while hunting for water, learning that a persistent weed could be food, or burning a hayfield to recreate a prairie. Contending with the fallout of fires, floods, and tornadoes, she offers responses to natural disasters that reflect the importance of community, now and for generations to come.

Whether tracking down a rare, blue-glowing firefly, engineering a beaver-friendly waterway to appease a dying neighbor, or building a house of earthen blocks, Dean unites personal experience with science and history, presenting a perspective as informative as it is compelling.

Keenly attentive to the stakes for our planet’s future—and the implications of extreme weather, shifting agricultural practices, and political divides—Shelter and Storm illuminates a thoughtful way forward for anyone concerned about climate change and its far-reaching consequences or for anyone searching, as Dean has, for a more sustainable way to live.

Advance praise for Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless:

"In this remarkable collection of essays, Tamara Dean conveys the depth of our connection to the natural world with careful research and gentle words, bringing the Driftless area of Wisconsin to life. Shelter and Storm is regional literature at its finest. These smoothly flowing essays reveal both the character of the author and the character of the land in equal measure."

—Joan Maloof, author of Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest 

"There is so much to admire in these beautifully written essays, but foremost among them are Tamara Dean’s sense of awe in the natural world, her citizen science undertakings, and her deep research into both history and biology. Significantly, she is clear-eyed about assaults on the environment, documenting among them fierce storms, flooding, fires, and the spread of Lyme disease as results of climate change.

Although Dean’s homeplace is one particular area of Wisconsin, her passions and observations will resonate with readers everywhere."

—Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North

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During and after my career in IT, I wrote college textbooks on computer networking and telecommunications. Network+ Guide to Networks has long been a bestseller in the U.S. and was translated into several languages. More