Editor’s Note: Our foundation helped International Partners in Mission (IPM) create its “international immersion experience” program as a way to generate unrestricted revenue in order to sustain and expand its mission impact – a great example of a nonprofit being market-driven and “finding a need and filling it.” Our Managing Director, Bill Leamon, is taking a group of students from Notre Dame College to Nicaragua (the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere) with IPM next spring, and he recommended this book to me. I found the explanation of dependent economies (where most of the effort goes into goods for export rather than goods for local consumption) very enlightening, along with gaining a better understanding of how much our foreign policy towards Nicaragua (an American, William Walker, was even its President from 1856-57) has shaped the country’s governance, as well as contributed to its dismal impoverishment.

Excerpt: “Considering Nicaragua’s recent history in light of its past, then, I felt compelled to change the subtitle of the book to the more realistic, if less upbeat, “Living in the Shadow of the Eagle.” For Nicaragua, there has long been – and probably always will be – an “eagle” in the northern horizon.”