Now Reading: Alumni Books

Spring 2025 
By Jennifer Latson

Foreign Agents
How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers
Threaten Democracy Around the World
Casey Michel ’10
St. Martin’s Press, 2024

Ivy Lee, known to many as the father of public relations, gained prominence in the early 20th century for boosting the brands of politicians and industry leaders such as the Rockefellers, Charles Schwab and even Woodrow Wilson. Then, in the 1920s and ’30s, Lee began to offer his services abroad, where he built up a less savory clientele — including Benito Mussolini in Italy and the rising Nazi regime in Germany — and secretly worked to improve their image in the U.S. When this became public knowledge, Americans were outraged, and Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, requiring all Americans who were working on behalf of foreign regimes to disclose the details of their involvement. 

But as Casey Michel reveals in his new book, “Foreign Agents,” the law has done little to curb the problem. American lobbyists, publicists, political consultants, and even nonprofit leaders and university administrators continue to advance the interests of authoritarian foreign regimes. If anything, writes Michel, the head of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, the practice is more pervasive — and dangerous — now than ever before. 

Soft Power for the Journey 
The Life of a STEM Trailblazer 
Sandra K. Johnson ’88
CRC Press, 2024

When she graduated from Rice in 1988, Sandra K. Johnson became the first Black woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. On her journey from humble beginnings in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to the highest echelons of the technology sector, she’s achieved a number of other firsts — and navigated daunting challenges as a woman of color in a male-dominated field. In “Soft Power for the Journey,” she describes how she overcame those challenges during a career that began at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center (where she contributed to the design of the groundbreaking Deep Blue chess machine) and led her into global business leadership as chief technology officer of IBM’s Africa region. Upon her retirement, Johnson launched SKJ Visioneering and Global Mobile Finance, a financial services firm that provides safe, reliable and low-cost transnational banking services. 

“I sense I am on the precipice of fulfilling a grand assignment in this new life, one with a significant global impact,” she writes. “I am excited about influencing at the highest levels. Yes, my work has just begun.”

Mound City
The Place of the Indigenous Past
and Present in St. Louis
Patricia Cleary ’84
University of Missouri Press, 2024

Before French settlers founded St. Louis in the late 18th century, it had been home for centuries to Native Americans, drawn by fertile soil, abundant animal life and access to major waterways. These Native occupants built a complex of more than two dozen massive geometric earthworks around a central plaza, earning the settlement the nickname “Mound City.” But this Indigenous culture was quickly erased after Europeans established a foothold in the vicinity, writes Patricia Cleary, a history professor at California State University, Long Beach. Today, few St. Louis residents have any knowledge of the settlement. In “Mound City,” Cleary sets out to rectify this historic oversight and explore why, and to what end, Indigenous peoples’ culture and history has vanished from the American landscape — and our collective memory. “I want non-Indigenous readers to think about how historical marginalization occurred and the role it has played in the political, economic, and cultural ambitions and agendas of earlier generations of westward-moving white Americans,” she writes.