John Perkins dedicates his surprise hit, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" (Berrett-Koehler) to Jaime Rold??s, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. "Both (had) died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Rold??s and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in."

The book proposes a behind-the-curtain version of global events in which highly paid professional members of the international banking community-like Perkins, who from 1971 to 1981 worked for the international consulting firm Chas T. Main-helped cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars, co-opting their governments and industries by lending them more money than they could ever repay-more money than was needed for their projects, in fact-then taking over their economies and funneling the profits from U.S. taxpayer-backed infrastructure improvements into the pockets of development corporations like Haliburton and Bechtel. If the countries didn't go along, pressure tactics, or worse, followed.

The book is conspiratorial and reads like a global spy thriller. Among his numerous international entanglements, from Latin America to Indonesia to the Middle East, he also more cites his work as a hired gun to promote the Seabrook nuclear power plant, even after he began to doubt the validity of his arguments.

Perkins says he'd wanted to write about his role in this post-Cold War approach to foreign policy for 20 years but couldn't because each time he started, "my decision to begin (writing) again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop." Today, he's turned over a new leaf, devoting himself to his own new-age organization dedicated to changing physical and spiritual consciousness. But his long-term role in promoting the interests of the global corporatocracy and his capacity for self-deception make one feel that his motives aren't yet entirely transparent or credible. In a convincing twist, the details of his conversion aren't half as solid as the portrait he paints of the "true" world order.

In the end, the memoir feels perfectly human. That is, there are flaws, but there's also a ring of truth. That economic hit men "funnel World Bank, U.S. government, and other foreign 'aid' funds into the coffers of international businesses and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources" with "fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, and murder" in a "game as old as Empire," is, after all, an explanation of the current state of world affairs that makes perfect sense.