Book Review by Stephanie Burt Featured in The Boston Globe

Professor Stephanie Burt wrote a book review on Rob Sheffield's Heartbreak is the National Anthem. An excerpt is included below: 

Rob Sheffield wants you to know that he’s now a true Swiftie. “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem,” his slim, strongly felt, and delightful collection of chapters about Taylor Swift begins with his awe at her early fans’ “total commitment.” It ends with Sheffield attending “three consecutive nights” of the Eras tour, “singing and weeping and suffering through an emotional epic Taypocalypse.” In between Sheffield reacts to each album and to a triple handful of favorite songs, riffing and expanding on the 274-paragraph ranked list of Taylor’s songs that Sheffield, a longtime writer for Rolling Stone, maintains for that magazine.

This book clearly grew from those lists, and from other pieces Sheffield has filed about Swift’s career: It’s what science fiction writers used to call a fixup, a book assembled, expanded, and revised from work created for magazines. In science fiction that might be a future history full of robots. For Sheffield it’s how Swift “reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image,” sharing the deepest cuts and the brightest flashes from her “zero-to-sixty heart."

Read more here.