Sandford Borins

Always searching for new material for my narratives courses, I just viewed the 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War. The film was directed by Mike Nichols with a screenplay by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by George Crile. While the movie got great reviews from top critics including Roger Ebert and James…

While the omniscient author was the standard point of view for nineteenth century novels, one notable exception was Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and short stories about the detective extraordinaire Sherlock Holmes. As anyone who has read them knows, the narrator is Holmes’s assistant Doctor Watson. The stories were written to create suspense, as the great…

One of Robert McNamara’s controversial accomplishments was putting in place a rigorous strategic planning process in the Defense Department. Essentially, McNamara elevated strategic planning from the individual forces to the departmental level, and assigned it to a small group of people chosen in his image – brilliant young quantitatively-oriented civilians – and reporting directly to…

I just read Winston Churchill CEO a new book by Alan Axelrod, who describes himself as a prolific author of business and popular history books. The book is a most recent example of the “lessons from …” genre of business books. The book has several strengths. Axelrod is a lucid and eloquent writer, easy to…

The 1964 movie Seven Days in May in a fictional way combines the concerns raised by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Watergate break-in. Seven Days in May is about a plot by the joint chiefs of staff to launch a coup because the president has signed a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union under…

The 1976 film “All the President’s Men” is fascinating for its perspectives on the craft of investigative journalism and on the Nixon Presidency, which was the ultimate object of the investigation. The movie shows in great detail what investigative journalists do and how they do it: searching for disgruntled front-line staff willing to provide leads,…

I’ve begun work on the chapter on modern American political narratives, a very rich genre with many fascinating exemplars. One of the modern classics is Allen Drury’s Pulitzer prize winning 1959 novel, and director Otto Preminger’s 1962 film, Advise and Consent. Taking its title from one of the powers of the Senate enumerated in the…