War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading.
Finding family was like finding a Tardis – I realised I could fall into it for ever, tumble into everyone else's stories, fight their fires, justify their memories.
Likewise, the characters in Allen's 10 stories fight their way uphill in a bullish, often haphazard fashion, contending with all manner of obstacles, both familial and fantastical.
He is the author of two books on values and leadership, The Story of Success: Five Steps to Mastering Ethics in Business (2005) and War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading (2016).
He once wrote, "We are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else"; though the Bolsheviks in his stories fight and work, they lack love.
And a pitch-perfect satire of the "West Side Story" fight scene (replace Jets and Sharks with Spiders and Comfy Hammocks) exposes them as theater nerds.
One man, not of the community but nevertheless an integral figure in the story, fought in Vietnam, but that conflict is mentioned just once.
Twelve thousand visitors were counted before the police acted, seizing 13 paintings, including Boccaccio Story, Fight With an Amazon, Leda and the Swan and Under the Mango Tree.
Jeanne d'Arc's story and gameplay are both first-rate, but they are essentially separate entities; you watch some story, fight a little and keep doing that until the game ends.
It was almost like that Rocky movie where you see Rocky sitting around and telling stories about fights.
