It begins with sulphur and fire, “angry, thick, green-gray smoke”. Phones are exploding and pockets are literally burning. Once loyal customers are gazing pensively at their still room-temperature Galaxy Note 7’s as if they are unpinned grenades – expensive, newly-minted, and ticking.

The public fear and panic is manageable, phones and batteries can be replaced, and the next product will clear the air. The laughter and mockery though – the damage to reputation – isn’t. It speaks to an old hangover – the cough at the end of a long cancer. The Republic of Samsung was again crumbling, under the weight of its own corporate culture.

This is where Samsung Rising kicks off, and it’s where our author, Geoffrey Cain, also enters the story. As a young, hopeful, foreign correspondent trying to look behind the manufacturing, behind the technical details and mistakes, and into the syndromic world that let it all happen. It’s an unspoken story that everyone seems to know their own small, limited part of, and for which everyone has a different name: “the Church of Samsung”, “the Samsung Way”, “the Republic of Samsung”.

A citizen of the Japanese empire, and a relatively lucky one at that, founder Lee Byung-chul stumbled home after a lengthy night of “gambling and dominoes”, looked down on his three sleeping children and suffered a collapse of conscience: “I’ve idled away my time. It’s time to set an aim to life”. He was 26 years old. The Three Star Shop (‘Samsung Sanghoe’) was soon launched, selling dried fish and vegetables. Then its grocery stores, breweries, newspapers, universities, sugar refineries, fabrication, banks, insurance companies, department stores, fertilizer, and semiconductors. Within a handful of years, Lee has travelled from delinquent stop-out to the richest man on the peninsula.

It’s a dubious tale, and it’s self-told with a soon-to-be-familiar spiritual loftiness. The Samsung machine wants us to believe that while for the rest of us rock bottom is a complete mess of dignity, morality and thought, they are built from sterner material. In Lee’s lowest moment he is still polished and clean; a walking, talking ubermensch preaching to the world quasi-religious gems like “in the future, one person will be feeding thousands more”.

Cain does an admirable job of not scoffing too loudly at this – leaving the space for his reader to indulge privately. It’s not just that Samsung Rising has more important targets in mind, but also a certain contextualisation: the truth of Samsung’s origin doesn’t matter as much as that the story is told, and told in this specific, calculated way.

Newly independent but firmly authoritarian, Lee “built his fortune” in Korea the only way possible, “using political savvy”. Which is a long way around saying ‘corruption’. And there is no escaping the dubious place that Samsung held at this time, the all-too-close relationship with government and national exploitation, but as Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee and certainly Chun Doo-hwan, are remembered for all their missteps, Samsung has walked through history – hand-in-hand with these men – and yet has done so sporting a proud, and largely untouchable, shine.

So the prescience here, and public relations campaign, deserves respect. It certainly takes some explaining. How is it possible that the same average citizen condemning the bribery of former President Park Geun-hye, is also so comfortable defending the company who paid the bribe, shouting proudly on the same street corner barricade “Samsung built this nation!”

Why, for that matter, is the nepotism between Park and her life-long friend, Choi Soon-sil, so unforgivable, but Vice Chairman of Samsung, Lee Jae-yong, can undercut his shareholders for personal gain and be welcomed back into the centrality of Korean life.

At every step, through every administration – authoritarian and democratic – Samsung was there in the shadows, watching, and participating in, the tragedies of the modern era. There were times that Samsung didn’t have much choice in this, held hostage so-to-speak (most notably by Park Chung-hee) by the nation-building whims of Korean leaders. But not many hostage takers reward their victims with anything other than freedom – what Samsung got for its cooperation was the wealth and resources of an entire nation.

Aristocracy has something to do with this, but not everything. The Lee family has kept close circles of marriage, tying business to political influence. But none of this comes close to touching the royal status of Park Geun-hye, as the daughter of former-leader Park Chung-hee, and someone whose mother was assassinated whilst serving as first lady. Yet all of this quickly turned liability when political scandal hit – ‘Korea’s Princess’ was accused of acting like a princess, and  “within weeks, President Park’s approval rating collapsed to 4 percent” and the “largest protests in the nation’s democratic history took place”.

But Samsung endured, in body and image. The rise and success of founder Lee Byung-chul is still a part of Korean folklore, young boys and girls hear about it in the same tones – and with the same constant echo – as they do Tangun, King Sejong, Commander Yi Sun-Shin, or Hong Gil-dong. And that was always the idea!

At some point early-on in the Samsung narrative, the Korean company became the Korean nation. Early advertising campaigns laid the ground – “fifty years with our minjok (a term that translates loosely to ‘Korean race’ or ‘racial nation’)”. This connects Samsung not with the South Korean republic, but with divided histories, an uncertain future, and with Koreans North of the 38th parallel. To hate Samsung is to hate Korea, and to hate yourself as a Korean… so no wonder the company has thrived so well!

What makes this even more remarkable is just how un-Korean Samsung are behind all the smiles and advertising. Despite nodding proudly to the minjok, Lee Byung-chul wanted it reformed, to show more “loyalty”, “patriotism”, and more “capacity for unity and diligent work”; he wanted it to be more “Japanese”. Even in 1968, once the foundation of Samsung was firmly established, Lee would “secretly bring in Japanese experts” to “teach my engineers”. And when this growing empire outlived its teacher (prevailing in the ‘Sony Wars’) it moved west to the United States in search of the design expertise and marketing techniques that it needed to challenge Apple.

If authenticity is a weakness of Samsung, ambition certainly isn’t. Behind it all is a strange, fanatical, cringe-worthy culture that worked wonders until it spectacularly didn’t anymore, and which resists change to this day. Cain speaks of an episode in 2010 where new recruits are seen lined up in battle formation, all wearing the “military dress of a French musketeer”, and cheering in unison “Youth with boiling blood, conquer the summer season”; a banner reading ‘PRIDE IN SAMSUNG’ hangs over a nearby hillside.

From Apple’s Steve Jobs, to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sony’s Akio Morita, the tech world has no shortage of eccentric leaders and cult-like employees, but none of it comes close to Samsung. Beyond the Hitler Youth-like display above, employees often start their days by watching thirty minute recorded sermons from the chairman, where he seems to spend less time on motivation and more on absolution, asking his employees to “examine their morality and rediscover their pasts.”

Written by a journalist, Samsung Rising is as comfortable as you would expect. The prose is appropriately invisible, chapters begin and are interlaced with personal stories, and the fuzzy technological and economic details are as clear as they are ever going to be. A large chunk of its Korean audience are sure not to like it though – Geoffrey Cain has laid out the rise and success of an extraordinary company, with all the mess, disgrace and ego un-redacted.

There will be an instinct out there to defend Samsung here, as one might a family member, someone who you owe so much to. And that is exactly why this book needed to be written, and perhaps could only be done so by an outsider looking in. We all know Samsung’s side of this argument, what their tint on their own history is… the other side needed telling; and how refreshing it is.