Wisconsin Historical Society Press (April 1, 2025)
This essay collection for adult readers offers a personal perspective on dozens of legendary figures with often surprising connections to Wisconsin, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jackie Robinson, Oprah Winfrey, Joni Mitchell, Harrison Ford, Elvis Presley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Carrie Coon, Joan Cusack, Ann Landers, Nirvana, Orson Welles, and Joyce Carol Oates. Readers will learn more about heroes they know and discover new heroes to fall in love with. With revelatory details and dramatic storytelling, the book establishes Wisconsin as a notably influential place: a crossroads for people who changed the world.
PRAISE FOR WISCONSIN IDOLS
Dean Robbins’s collection of brief essays is a passionate and poetic homage to one hundred musicians, artists, thinkers, entertainers, and athletes (including me) whose presence, however brief or long, in his beloved Wisconsin impacted the state and him. It’s both insightful and entertaining.
— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, National Basketball Association hall-of-famer
Wisconsin Idols sheds light on my quirky home state and the legendary individuals who have left their mark on the world after passing through it. Dean Robbins puts a personal spin on their stories, offering critical analysis, little-known details, and revelatory anecdotes. His essays are infused with wit and flair, especially in the chapter where he dives into my work with Nirvana on Nevermind. It’s a wild ride through history that keeps you hooked.
— Butch Vig, Grammy Award-winning music producer and the drummer for the band Garbage
Lucky me, I’m included in Dean Robbins’s wonderful, skillfully written book. I had no idea that many of these extraordinary people had Wisconsin connections. Wisconsin Idols is artful, thoughtful, and sharp-sighted—and it’s bursting with interesting facts and one fascinating anecdote after another.
— Kevin Henkes, Caldecott Medal-winning children’s author
Each monograph is a tightly written paean to a hero, a protagonist, a mentor, a friend. Any of you readers fortune enough to grab a copy, congratulations; all others, you’ll simply have to wait for the second printing.
— André De Shields, Tony and Emmy award-winning actor
Not only are the stories in Wisconsin Idols inspiring, exhilarating and moving—they gave me a whole new way of seeing this state. Not just as a collection of towns and streets and gentle hills, but as a landscape of stories, inhabited by the traces of legendary makers, creators, doers, and thinkers. I’ll never travel Wisconsin again without wondering “what happened here?” and “who lived there?” This is place-making at its finest. What an absolute gift.
— Anne Strainchamps, Peabody Award–winning host and cocreator of the National Public Radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge
I loved being a 1950s student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where my professional writing career began. Now, thanks to Dean Robbins’s Wisconsin Idols, I’ve belatedly discovered Wisconsin’s cultural richness. It’s a fascinating, sharply written index to his mind, and just as important, a reminder that the USA is not just a union of states, but a union of cultural streams, fascinating people, and high achievers. These are people you need to know, from cultural icons to unknowns who should be known.
— Avi, Newbery Medal–winning children’s author
Dean Robbins is a Wisconsin Idol par excellence, a writer to be celebrated for his curiosity, his great good humor, his elegant prose, his inherent grooviness, and his range of interests. Someone needs to sneak a profile into this wonderful book!
— Jane Hamilton, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning novelist
Dean Robbins’s Wisconsin Idols combines a youthfully innocent wonder at the magic of stardom with a seasoned journalist’s incisive analysis of what makes these stars so remarkable—and how they are linked in some way to Wisconsin. The result is one hundred snapshots that range widely, including some greats you’ve probably never heard of, all told with a born storyteller’s vision and verve. It’s a great read.
— Bruce Murphy, editor and award-winning columnist, Urban Milwaukee
PRESS
Wisconsin Public Radio interview
Wisconsin State Journal interview
Channel 3000/News 3 “Live at Four” interview
Madison Magazine Book of the Month
Milwaukee Shepherd Express interview
PURCHASE
REVIEWS
Each essay tells the story of these figures’ significance and connection to Wisconsin with humor, wit and reverence. Robbins puts on personal spin on the stories, based on interviews, intensive research and lifelong obsessions.
— Rich Rovito, Milwaukee Magazine
Dean Robbins presents short, well-researched and highly readable essays about the men and women who have inspired him. Each hero has a significant connection to Wisconsin and had a transformative impact on the broader world. If you know Robbins, you can hear his voice and personality loud and clear in these 100 pieces; if you don’t know him, you’ll feel like you do after reading this book. With its diverse mix of memorable and inspiring stories, “Wisconsin Idols” emerges as a balm for these troubled times.
— Michael Popke, Isthmus
‘Wisconsin Idols’ is a series of elegant, vivid and revealing two-page vignettes about remarkable people. There are lesser-known names along with famous ones, from Harrison Ford to Abraham Lincoln, many with unexpected connections to the Dairy State.
— Gayle Worland, Wisconsin State Journal
Book of the Month: Dean Robbins brings his passion for spotlighting prominent individuals to a grown-up audience with “Wisconsin Idols: 100 Heroes Who Changed the State, the World, and Me.” It’s a series of 100 bite-sized but meaty essays that explain why certain Wisconsin-connected figures have made such a lasting impression on his life. Some are humorous, others poignant, and all are well researched and informative.
— Maggie Ginsberg, Madison Magazine
Reading this book feels like sitting in a bar with the local who knows everything about everyone in town, except instead of hearing about neighborly disputes, the stories are about moments that shaped history.
— Denise Robbins, Capital Times
The book makes the case for why Wisconsin has been a crossroads for trailblazers, newsmakers and glass-ceiling breakers for decades.
— Wisconsin Public Radio
Dean Robbins has come out with a new book titled “Wisconsin Idols,” colorfully written about people who left a mark on the state. He also profiles them for a personal reason: They left a mark on him.
— Kenosha News
Like most of us, Dean Robbins had posters of his personal heroes on bedroom walls since second grade. Unlike most of us, he’s traveled Wisconsin in search of concrete connections to their lives. This compendium of his idols isn’t a set of mini biographies. It’s a collection of quick and unique tales from the lives of people who made a mark in the state. They captured the imagination of a talented writer with wide-ranging interests. From Liberace to Nirvana, O’Keeffe to Avi, Ada Deer to Vel Phillips, Bart Starr to Abdul-Jabbar, Aldo Leopold to The Onion, they are not all locals, but they all had pivotal moments in Wisconsin that mattered to Dean Robbins. Now they matter to me, and obscure people that I’ve respected, such as author Edna Ferber and photographer H. H. Bennett, jump back to center stage. The book is moving, inspirational, and so much fun.
— Tim McCarthy, Boswell Book Company