Good, but not great; Relies on cliches of N. Korea
925800
I like David Baldacci.  His stories are usually page turners, and they are riveting.
This one, follows the same formula.  However, mid-stream, you could figure out exactly where the story was going.  Much of it relies on clich&eacute;s of North Korea, neo-Nazi's, etc.  (although with the disappearance of the North Korean leader the last few weeks, it was a good time to read up on what's going on inside, even fiction).

The characters were interesting, but we didn't get a chance to know them deeply.  Running them through near-death exercises only goes so far in helping me connect to the character.

So, it was good, but not great.
176485
When Suki Kim was thirteen living in South Korea, her fathers business went bankrupt. Because bankruptcy was an offense punishable by law, Suki and her family fled to America. In her heart, however, Suki has always felt her home to be Korea. She feels displaced, melancholy, and haunted by stories of Korea and the tragedies of those family members who disappeared into Kim Jong-ils Hermit Kingdom. In this context, Suki, a successful novelist, writer, journalist, and professor, infiltrates North Korea posing as a Christian missionary and as an ESL teacher where she teaches college-age boys English.

There is a tension between what she knows and what she can tell he boys; what mythology the North Korean presents of itself and the hell that is the true reality. Kim must navigate these disparities while aching with melancholy as she contemplates her family members who disappeared there. This is a book about torment, deception, and myth-making.

The hell of Pyongyang is not just its appearance, but its symbolism. As we read, But it was not Pyongyangs physical attributes physical attributes that made it so ugly in my eyes. It was what it stood for. It was the most horrible city in the world to me, and every time I saw it in the distance, on the horizon, outside the van window, I felt disheartened. Pyongyang was the Xanadu of North Koreathe city the rest of the country slaved to feed. It was a greedy, bloodsucking monster, and sometimes I wished it would just go up in smoke.
2941493
This is a film written by Shintaro Ishihara, the author of "The Japan That Can Say No" and also the Gov of Tokyo (they have a Gov, not mayor).  It is about young kamikaze pilots in the Japanese army air force, told from the point of view of the owner of a cafe near the air base.  Evidently Ishihara actually talked to this woman and based the film on her recollections.  The DVD itself is from Indonesia or Malaysia, but worked fine in my DVD player.  The film does not have much action in it and is told from a flashback perspective.  Ishihara has an agenda here, as he has the admiral in charge of the Kamikaze unit stating that Japan started the war to free the Asian peoples from white domination--this is a very questionable premise to say the least, as many Chinese, Koreans and Phillipine citizens could attest too.  There is very little action in the film, except for a couple short scenes where American planes strafe a student group, the restaurant owner is beat up by Japanese secret police and the final kamikaze scene.  Otherwise this film might be too slow paced for American viewers.  If you want a film that has more "meat" to it but still gives a point of view of the kamikaze, try "Otoko Tachi No Yamato" which in my opinion is a better film than this one.  I gave this film 3 stars because they actually built a pretty accurate Haybusa fighter with an operating engine and it is used repeatedly in the film.  Otherwise this might be a 2 star film.
4911596
Big theme of this book: President Ike was not as dull as he seemed then, or now. Throughout much of the book I thought the point was well-defended. However, by the time I got to the end, the over-arching conclusion seemed to be just the opposite. The hero who won the war was extremely out of touch with the radical new world he'd helped to build. It's hard to accept that a perpetual willingness to use nukes if necessary to defend our interests in remote locations exemplified wisdom more than it signified a failure to come to terms with shifting international political realities. Still, we have Ike to thank for his Farewell Address, and that's something of great value and importance, even though it seems never to have been very well understood by any generation.
4947231
Back in graduate school now, my professor, a world-renowned international developmentalist, asked me to write a paper discussing how economic development changed the culture of Korea.  My search for books that may give me "clues" to what current culture is like in North Korea led me to this book.  North Korea is where my grand parents are from and where both my parents were born.  My parents are both 61 years old.  My grand parents left North Korea in 1953 and my parents left Korea in the in the early 1970s.  If it weren't for my ancestors, I may have lived my life in Pyongyang instead of the previledged life I lead in the West.
I am no culturalist but North Korea, as a corrupted Stalinist  cum cultist state is now very much different from South Korea.  In South Korea, previledged rich kids drive their own automobiles whereas in North Korea, the fields are tilled by ox-drawn carts.  In South Korea, bottles of Western scotch is drunk in night clubs where tabs come up to hundreds of dollars a pop and designer wears are de rigour with young college kids who indulge in decadences such as elective plastic surgery.  In North Korea, hundreds of thousands of kids are stunted from malnourishment.  I can't think of two more diametric cultures that could have emerged amongest one group of people: abject poverty and outrageous decandence.  I am not judging South Korea nor am sympathetic to the North, I am just pointing out the stark differences.  Anyway, if you want to know more about North Korea, this is a first-person account of someone who lived in a Korean gulag from the 1980s to the 1990s.  The person who lived this life, Kang Chol-Hwan, is only about 34 years old in 2002.
To recap: In 2002, there are two Koreas, one the 7th largest economy in the world, the other where 2 to 3 million people are reported to have died of famine during 1995 to 1999: that's 10 percent of the population of North Korea.  To wit, now there are two Koreas with two cultures.  50 years of separation and experiements in autarky vs. free-market economics (albeit, an Asian version) is the cause.
This book gave me a first-hand account of what life is like in North Korea.  It is reader friendly and informative.  Along with USAID (US International Agency for Development) Director Andrew S. Natsios book called "The Great North Korean Famine," I got a some ideas about what is happening in North Korea in the late 1990s to the present.
A good read if you are interested in what life is like for some North Koreans.
2958016
This is one of those first novels that promises better things to come. On its own, it's decent, but not earth-shaking.

You Are One of Them begins with an actual piece of Cold War history: a 10-year-old girl (named Samantha Smith in real life) writes a letter to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov in 1982, asking for peace. He answers and invites her to visit the USSR; she becomes a media sensation, but tragically dies in a plane crash a few years later. In this fictional version, the celebrity is Jennifer Jones, and our narrator is her best friend Sarah Zuckerman, who also writes a letter but doesn't get a response. The first third of the book mostly focuses on Sarah and Jenny's childhood relationship, but the bulk of the story is set ten years later, when Sarah gets a letter suggesting Jenny didn't really die, and travels to Moscow to look for the truth.

Some of the early publicity pegged this book as a mystery or a thriller, but (to my relief) it's more literary fiction than either; it lacks the relentless pace of a thriller or the tidy structure of a mystery, and readers looking for either will likely be disappointed. Instead it's an intelligently written novel about lost friendship and about the Cold War and its aftermath (the global and the personal are inextricable here). The writing style is polished and lacking in fluff, and the pacing is smooth. The structure is maybe a bit lopsided, spending what feels like a long time on the childhood friendship before we get to the meat of the story; those scenes might have worked better interspersed with the Moscow chapters. But this is a quick read and kept me interested throughout. Even the ambiguous ending worked for me, though it might not for a mystery reader.

The character development is mixed, and this is one area I expect to Holt improve in future books. Sarah's narrative voice is strong and distinct, and gives the reader a clear picture of who she is on the inside, but the actual scenes do little to throw her personality into relief. So, for instance, we see a lot of her loneliness and feeling that everyone abandons her, and her intelligence and self-consciousness come through clearly. But she simply tells us that she has trouble making friends because she's too melancholy and complex for other people; her interactions with others show little to either support or contradict that. Meanwhile, there are some good moments with the supporting cast--Sarah's mother in particular is vividly drawn--but for the most part, while they're not flat, they are forgettable. Even Jenny never quite came together for me. The development of the setting is interesting though, and the author's personal experience as an expat in Russia comes through clearly.

In the end, a decent book although not a great one, but the writing is strong enough that I will be interested in Holt's next effort. With better characterization, it could be excellent.
3910285
I had just returned from a trip to Tokyo, Roppongi in fact, when I read this book, and found that while Grimwood captured some of the surface details of life there, it didn't seem to go much deeper--as if he had visited Tokyo for the prospect of making some quick observations to provide background to the book (up to and including the ploys of characters to seduce Japanese women which I'd read on a web-site while in Tokyo ;).

I think that contributed to an overall feeling of "good story idea, not very good story telling". I found the characters to be somewhat engaging, the plot pretty good, but the words themselves didn't seem to flow quite right. There was a pleasant mix of the mysteries of everyday life coupled into the true sci-fi part.

It was a decent read--as the stars say "It's OK", and I would recommend reading it but not expecting glory.
325880
Film maker lvaro Longoria managed to get permission to film inside the DPRK but it was a guided tour  that was to be expected. His tour was exclusively of the cosseted capital Pyongyang. However, Longoria knew that there would be restrictions on what he could and more importantly could not film.

His guides take him on a tour of all the new shiny buildings and installations and shows us all the shiny happy North Koreans enjoying the gifts of the benevolent Kim Jong-un. Everywhere there are statues and pictures of The Great Leaders who must be constantly adored as some sort of deity and the people seem to have genuine emotions about these dictators. The film also interviews experts and defectors as well as human rights activists and strives to show both sides in the ever growing propaganda war.

The attempts to be balanced are credit worthy and Longoria himself missed his calling for the diplomatic mission. I was reminded of a Benny Hill sketch where an advertising board said People buy Smiths Pies because they don't know any better; and I think that is why North Koreans seem to be so content with their lot in the World  they just do not know what they are missing. He did mention the markets and the hard currency shops which the regime has had to allow to exist as it was too troublesome to uninvent choice as it were.

What is left out is equally important and any one who has studied this hermit kingdom will know of some of the bizarre and cruel abuses of human rights, but the whole point of the film is to redress the more extreme distortions of propaganda and try to see if there is any unvarnished truth that would help us understand them. In the end I felt he did a rather good job and as such can recommend to anyone who has an interest in modern social history.
3296196
I was very excited to read this book when I heard about it from a veteran friend of mine on Facebook. I served on this same Nike-Hercules missile battery from mid December 1972 to late January 1974. My tour probably over lapped the author's. I was an MP Sentry Dog handler at the launcher site at Songdo Beach, about five miles from the Munhak admin-IFC site. It was called F Btry, 2nd Bn, 44th ADA when I was there (late 1972). For most soldiers Korea was a world of cheap drugs, booze, and hookers. A lot of the shenanigans portrayed in the book were very familiar. Like Patty, I did spend some time in Inchon messing around at the Yellow House, and the bars.  But, I couldn't sympathise with the main character, Patty. He seemed like mostly a shallow smart-ass, and self proclaimed stud going out of his way to antagonize the BC, 1SG, and other lifers. Yet despite his attitude he gets promoted over the wishes of the First Sergeant, and Battery Commander, an impossible event. His going into detail about the radar equipment was a bit dull I thought. The author also exaggerated the Vietnam War's impact at that time in the military. Vietnam was winding down by the early 1970's,  we all knew that, and weren't much concerned about it anymore. The Vietnam War certainly was not a "looming" meatgrinder still swallowing up personnel like the author depicts. The stuff about a North Korean spy, and being fired upon was way over the top. I do remember the explosion of frogs in the early summer, and how they came to grief at the hands of bored, and devious G.I.'s. The part in the book about the First Segeant regularly smashing himself in the head with the phone reciever was true. The old timers would tell us about being in the orderly room at Munhak, and seeing the First Sergeant banging his head with the receiver. He (the First Sergeant) had been replaced by the time I got there in late 1972. The book has it's flaws,and many far-fetched events are portrayed, but there is enough truth so it's not a bad read.
146843
Admirable in its emotional honesty, the book was moving. Unfortunately, it wasn't however quite as compelling as I hoped.

It did a good job of revealing the fact that DPRK is a nation built on fear, obsessed with only one thing: it's leaders. The book tells a tale of helplessness, an education system that is self-defeating, woefully soft on educational value, and it is clear that these students were being programmed to serve the political ends and to foster continued robotic allegiance to the nation's frontmen.

It provided a real sense of the helplessness of the situation in which the country has found itself entrenched.

But as book, it did most of that in the first 100 pages. The rest waxed poetic but did nothing to harden the authors findings. Just more of the same. That is not to say that it is a bad book. I think there's plenty to take in, but I feel the title suggesting that this represented the findings of someone that was 'undercover' was perhaps a little over-promising. She saw in essence only what she was permitted to see and offered no major 'insider' insights. She was if anything kept well and truly at arms length from any meaningful understanding of how the country was run.

I heard Kim interviewed on the BBC where she complained that the book was being treated as a memoir rather than a piece of journalism but I think truthfully, it offered little in the way of journalistic insights. Instead, it was a more of an emotionally told story that really had all the markings of a memoir. Recollections, memories, coloured by deeply felt sentiments.

Politically unrevealing, but an interesting journal of life as a volunteer teacher in the world's most bizarre nation.
3102375
I recall liking "Outposts" and "Fracture Zone" though it's been a while. "Korea", however, was the end of line for me. Winchester makes a repeated point of how popular he is among South Koreans by virtue of his being English; that was snotty enough by the third go-round. What did me in was the time he arrived at a U S base, browbeat them into letting him stay there (when they didn't have to), and then proceeded to trash just about every single U S military person he ran across after accepting their hospitality. He also had a penchant for running into anti-American Koreans; you'd think they were rife, along with all of the many prostitutes throwing themselves at him. Oh yeah, there was one old soldier, fawningly pro-British, as though the U K had been the ones who saved South Korea.

Yes, there's well-researched history here, hence a second star. Not worth purchasing new. If you can't find a used copy, get it from the library.
2616183
"Refighting the Last War" is an interesting title, because it  conjures up all the things that soldiers never want to be guilty of,  looking back and doing things the "old way."  I picked up this  book expecting a lively criticism of how we may have missed the boat in the  Cold War's first hot spot.  My disappointment was compounded by my naivite.  It is immediately apparent to the reader that the author is not attempting  a fresh interpretation, but rather a recap of what has already been  discussed, debated, and decided (sometimes erroneously as will be pointed  out later).
From the beginning it is clear that Korea is not fought like  any war previous: the fact that the Sec State led us into conflict, the  fact that Congress did not declare war, the President did not call up  reserve forces or nationalize the economy for war mobilization, to say  nothing of the air and naval restrictions imposed from the beginning of the  conflict.  Maybe MacArthur thought HE was refighting the last war, but that  is a conclusion the reader will come to independent of the author's  arguments.
Most telling to me is that although the book is post-Soviet  Union, there is no attempt to access archival material that many other  authors have, and who have published some startling conclusions, that  perhaps our interpretation of the war in the 50's was in fact correct.  The  author claims that there was a "gentleman's agreement" between  the USSR, US, and PRC to limit the war, and that Stalin and Mao monitored  US congressional hearings to take their cues on American strategy.  No  joke.  Where is the evidence?  No foot notes, no citations of archival  material, no logical followup.  The reader is expected to accept the  statement and the implications that maybe the Reds weren't so awful after  all.
There are occaissional flashes of interest, particularly in  discussing the issues surrounding the less known personalities such as  Admiral Joy, and Generals Van Fleet and Clark.  But if anything, all these  individuals chaffed at not being able to "refight the last war",  that is to wage war as they saw fit.
There are many statements and  assertions that just don't do justice to the reader looking for a deeper  story from Korea.  There is a lot better scholarship and interpretion out  there.
4193027
I've enjoyed his previous books but I found this effort to be a little choppy.  The story was very good, the atmosphere was just right (USN visited Korea several times in 74-76) you could almost smell the ville.

Down side, he uses terms that aren't really correct.  Saying 'charging handle' when a .45 slide is being racked or calling the pistol grip a 'hilt'.  These are minor quibbles but they still stick out and burn the flow of the story for me.  Perhaps the Army calls it a charging handle in some kind of odd slang transfer from a machine gun but it is jarring.

On the up side this is a deep story.  The impact of GIs on Korean society, particularly the bar girl scene is gone into in this book.  As a 20 year old it didn't really bother me, as an older man I look back and shudder at the fact that it is human trafficking supported by thousands and thousands of young soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.
2574916
3.5 Stars

1978 Seoul, Korea is when and where this story begins, telling the stories of two men and two women, primarily. One of the women from a very wealthy family - Jisun, the other  Namin, the daughter of parents who operate a push food cart as many hours of the day as possible just to barely survive. At the start, Jisun seems a bit frivolous in her determination to avoid being a part of her fathers world, where power and money reign. She becomes involved with an activist movement, while Namin works tirelessly to maintain the best grades. Namin is determined to rise above the life of her parents, and to help her disabled brother by becoming a physician. It is the only way for her family to escape the poverty theyve come to know, the poverty theyve become trapped by.

This debut novel opens in April of 1978 with a three-day protest scene, women factory workers are protesting, chanting their demands for guaranteed basic labor rights, and more.

In the predawn, the women gather like ghosts around the factory yard and formed rows as if on lines etched into the concrete. They sat shoulder to shoulder, close enough to link arms and share warmth. The drumming began with the sun.

Two young men, Sunam and Juno stand watching each day from the roof across the street, both also students at Seoul National University. Juno, a year older, had already made those oh-so-necessary connections at University, and Sunam hopes to gain entrance to the prestigious group known only as the Circle by virtue of his connection with Juno.

On the third day, police in riot gear arrive, give their last warning. In response, one woman protestor steps away from the line, removes her top, then her bra, tossing them to the ground. Other women follow. A riot breaks out, Sunam and Juno watching from their perch. When things have settled down, Juno sends Sunam to collect some souvenirs.

The story revolves mostly around these four primary characters, all University students. Their individual drives and ambitions are very different from each other, and yet in other ways they are more alike that different. Both Jisun and Namin, from two very different families, disparate lifestyles and dreams are bonded by their inner strength and commitment to their individual visions. No damsels in distress but passionate about their desires for their futures. For every man like Juno, there needs to be one like Sunam. Juno - the bossy almost bully type, has to be one better than anyone else, but especially those he is mentoring, training him to exude that put-on confidence that comes across more like arrogance. He needs someone to be his subject, his peon, in order to play the master and Sunam fits the bill.

I enjoyed this story, some parts more than others, but I rarely felt completely pulled into this story. The writing was fine, as in good enough, although there were parts where I felt the author showed promise of more, and I wanted more of that promise and less of the wandering ways of the story.

All that is not to say that this is not an enjoyable read, it is, I just found it to be an uneven distribution of enjoyable. Perhaps thats because I was expecting more, perhaps it was from all the meandering hither and yon. Would I recommend it? Yes, it is still an interesting portrait of a time and place when the world changed yet again, with the lives of those at the top lording it over the others, the lives of those climbing to the top trying to grab every possible advantage, even when it meant climbing over others.

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House
2314614
Kamila Shamsie, the author of Kartography, comes from a long line of distinguished writers. It is clear she has a knack for wordplay and was rasied in the cultural elite. Kartography is a book about many things: Karachi, the coming-of-age of a an girl who lives there, and the history and social aftermath of the Pakistani civil war. I found the book to be relatively competently written, seeing the relative youth of the author, though the plot tended to plod and the characters were not very sympathetic. I don't know if that was intentional, though I do see a postmodern attempt at lacking an authoritative moral voice. Though the author is to be commended on the preoccupation she has with the complicated nature of relationships, there seems to be a lack of real generosity between characters; most of them seem to be operating on self-centered ideologies or personal motivations which ultimately leads to a lot of broken relationships and families. We feel sympathetic for the circumstances of a number of different characters whose lives conflict due to how they feel about the past, the future, and how they relate to each other. But the characters are not heroic in even an every day sense. They are stuck in the ghosts of their pasts.

There is a lot of lack or resolution which is quite personally unsatisfying, because you feel that if the characters were not so egocentric they could resolve a lot of their bad blood and brooding. Not only is there a deterioration of a number of relationships, but the pretexts for these is somewhat unbelievable, being based on one-dimensional feuds relating to class and culture wars. I found a degree of social awkwardness in the protagonist and a concomitant naivete about human psychology that betrays the author's sheltered approach to the human condition and her adolescent idealism. In the end, I found the book to be personally valuable mostly insomuch as it revealed something about the nature of life in Karachi, a bustling, colorful patchwork of a city. Also, as the narrator and author are contemporaries of mine both chronologically and culturally, I found her condition of being on the verge of Pakistani and English/American culture to be relevant and interesting. I also learned something of the civil war and its effects on the Pakistani and Bengali psyche. Otherwise, not really a great piece of literature insofar as plot, characters, or writing style, though it has its moments. There is some good drama and a few good ideas, the best being the eponymous problem of how place simultaneously relates and segregates people, and how much of this is a figment of the imagination.
65153
Viewers of "Burma VJ" and readers of her "Finding George Orwell in Burma" (see my review) will learn about what's happened in Burma under the twin forces of military suppression of the 2007 demonstrations and Cyclone Nargis of 2008. Half a million (official toll's 138,000) may have been swept or battered to death during a 10-12 hour storm. Larkin compares a before-after aerial view of the Irrawaddy delta: "as if a bucket of water has been sloshed across an ink drawing; the carefully-marked lines had been erased and the paper beneath was buckled and distorted." (7)

Later, talking to survivors, she sees a ID-sized photo, all that a husband has of his dead wife. "A water stain had spread across his wife's broad cheekbones and the black-and-white image was already beginning to fade." (163) Memories and rumors, legends of surviving by hanging onto a python or clutching a crocodile spread. Under the total censorship, where complaining can land you life in prison, where the leaders of a police state fear their people and often meet violent ends while in power, the absence of comfort permeates this narrative.

It's in three parts: the storm, when Larkin sneaked in on a tourist visa for a month but, like all foreigners and aid workers and journalists and even many Rangoon folks wanting to help the survivors, she was limited in what she could learn. The second part investigates the regime, its xenophobic reaction to foreign intrusion, its crushing of the 2007 protests led by monks and students (see "Burma VJ"), and its strategic if extravagant relocation of its capital to a remote plot in the center of the country, far from a port or outside contamination as it were. Obscene profiteering, black magic-haunted dictators, astrology as domestic policy: these rule this corrupt satrap.

Finally, she returns a year after the storm to find some relief getting to perhaps half the survivors, but under a cruel regime, little progress as model camps for the press are dismantled, refugees are forced back to their vanished homes, and trauma, as over and over the people rise up and look for help only to be crushed as history is rewritten and memories are all these impoverished citizens of a vast open-air prison state have to endure, or be driven mad by.

What do you do when liberation keeps failing? Larkin often juxtaposes the propaganda of "New Light of Myanmar," the only sanctioned press mouthpiece, with the facts she witnesses and records. "In this Never-Never Land of the regime's imagination, survivors of the storm suffered no trauma and felt no grief at having lost family members, jobs, and livelihoods. Relieved to be so warmly looked after by their benevolent leaders, they sat smiling obediently amid mountains of mama noodles and brightly-colored plastic buckets." (72)

It's frustrating to read this book, and I closed it sadly. It feels incomplete, but this cannot be faulted on the author, who labors to evade the military, bureaucracy, and undercover police and who writes under an assumed name. There's a haunted quality to this tale, and even more when even the experts she cites often go nameless. One thinks of an ancient land where nothing but panic, rumors and fear stalk the dark fields where Death walks.

Larkin despite her clandestine investigations in a nation she knows well even fails to uncover as much as she or we'd wish, given the oppressive situation. But it's as close as Westerners will come, given the failure (as in Tibet, I thought) of the "moral high ground" to overthrow the "guns and brute force" of "the other side." (121) We are taught that goodness and morality will win, but when the junta prevents ships from delivering supplies or doctors from entering for fear that the natives will learn that the outside world is more generous than their own tyrants, one does despair for the Myanmar nightmare that had replaced free Burma.
3577850
In "Heaven's Soldiers", director Joon-ki Min carefully puts together a film that showcases epic Chosen Korean history alongside the modern political tensions of the 20th and 21st centuries. All at the same time, Joon-ki has created an important message for his audience that slowly folds into view by the end of the film. The plot erupts from the very beginning, when Kang Min Gil of the North Korean military steals a nuclear weapon that both North and South Korea were working on. South Korean officer Park Jeong Woo is sent to chase down Kang's contingent, but both sides (along with a doctor that Kang abducted) are transported back to 1572 through a comet. In this new time setting, the North and South Koreans meet the legendary Yi Sun-Shin, who is currently in his less-than-humble beginnings after failing his military exam. While waiting for the second arrival of the comet to return to their own time, Park attempts to reform Yi from the ginseng-smuggling bum that he is into the great hero of legend. Ultimately, Kang joins Woo on this endeavor (although for different reasons) and they finally help form a Yi that is able to defend his village against the invading Jurchens.
 Joon-ki's most difficult task with this film is presenting his argument as clearly as possible to an audience with a wide range of emotions concerning the whole North-South issue. He chooses obvious figureheads to represent each side (Kang and Park) and paints them with a clich animosity against one another. For instance, the banter between the two sides almost always results in exchanges of  "damn reactionaries" or "damn reds". When the soldiers find Yi, Park immediately wants to correct soon-to-be war hero, but Kang and his men believe that Yi's entire story is a South Korean myth which functions as propaganda. In the end, however, Kang becomes even more passionate about Yi's success than Park, claiming he was the key in clearing up Korea's shameful past.
 Yi Sun-Shin is portrayed as the mechanism that brings together the North and South against the Jurchens. He does this in the long run by making them set aside their differences to fight the invading barbarian hordes. He also literally eliminates whatever walls that they have made between themselves when he eliminates the soldiers' border marking line at his house. Thus, director Joon-ki Min wants his audience to see how the common past heals these modern barriers and makes the contemporary problems seem almost trivial when placed next to the trials faced by Yi in the 16th century. Thus, Joon-ki Min's film successfully engages the audience into thinking for themselves about the issue of reconciliation between North and South Korea.