Book Review
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE: ECONOMIC HIT MEN, JACKALS, AND THE TRUTH ABOUT GLOBAL CORRUPTION
By John Perkins Dutton Adult, 384 pages, $25.95
John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was a wake-up call for many, an insider’s account of doing dirty work for giant global companies in league with the U.S. government and international financial institutions. Though activists, investigative reporters and academics have been writing about many of the same aspects of global capital’s ugly underside for years, Mr. Perkins’ tell-all, breezy narrative helped the book read like a snappy spy thriller rather than a footnote-clogged tome. On The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, it reached a wide audience of readers eager to answer the perennial post-9/11 question “Why do they hate us?”
