Customer Reviews

Considering Aaron Sorkin: Essays on the Politics, Poetics and Sleight of Hand in the Films and Television Series

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a really engaging and smart book. I'm a huge fan of The West Wing and Sports Night, and A Few Good Men is one of my favorite films. So I was especially interested in reading a book that discusses all of Sorkin's works -- not just The West Wing but Sports Night and movies like The American President and Malice.

The book begins with a lengthy interview with Sorkin, and it is followed by eleven essays that examine the strengths and even some of the weaknesses in Sorkin's writing. This is a great read for any fan of Sorkin's work, and I highly recommend it.

This is a collection of essays by people in various fields, and the chapters cover the spectrum of Aaron Sorkin's work. And there is a dialogue between Fahy and Sorkin at the beginning.

I was most interested in the observations on "WW" and "The American President", those being my favorites. I found quite a few viewpoints that either confirmed what I felt I had already discovered about "WW" and "TAP" (and other Sorkin works), or gave me more to think about that I hadn't already considered.

Sort of like, "Oh, yeah! I noticed that, too!" or "Hmmm...I hadn't thought of that."

It's a good analysis without being heavy-handed, entertaining without being frivolous.

This is a great collection for the literate Sorkin fan. It makes connections among all his works, including his films. (I didn't even realize that he wrote the screenplay for the film Malice.) It debates issues. And it raises interesting and thoughtful questions.

I highly recommend it.

I really enjoyed this book. I liked reading different perspectives on Sorkin's writing. I liked the fact that the essays about Sorkin, who is such a smart, interesting writier, were also smart and interesting. Sorkin's work deserves this.

The book made me think about his writing in new ways.

I was disappointed in this book. I am familiar with Aaron Sorkin's plays, movies and television series and find him to be a brilliant and insightful writer. I was hoping to learn more about his process, technique and where in this "whiz kid" his idea pool resides. Instead I found this collection of esssays to be tedious and overly-analytical in their review of minutiae in an attempt to find hidden meaning in words and phrases. Aaron Sorkin's works are perceptive and realistic in pace and tone and substance, but the contributors to this book have found very little positive and a great deal of perceived subtext to examine. I would not recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Aaron Sorkin's work.

Being a fan of The West Wing, The American President, Sports Night and A Few Good Men, I assumed this book would have more "Sorkin" in it. Primarily it's a collection of folks over analyzing his work and contradicting each other at every turn. These are primarily people in love with the sound of their own reasoning. I give it a C-

I was expecting this book to be about the process Sorkin uses to write the masterful scripts that he does. I thought it would be about HOW he writes his scripts, not analyzing the scripts from an academic point of view. So, for those out there expecting the same: BE WARNED. The book is a collection of ACADEMIC, esoteric writings that analyze Sorkin's work.

I ended up returning the book.