Alumni Bookshelf
New books by Rice alumni cover motherhood, the Vietnam War, the unseen Erie Canal and more.
By Sarah Rufca Nielsen
Private Equity Mastery: The Ultimate Playbook for Investors, Executives, and Entrepreneurs
Robert Foye ’88, ’90
Author.Inc, 2025
Veteran investor Robert Foye pulls back the curtain on one of the business world’s most powerful and least transparent industries. Drawing on three decades in boardrooms and deal negotiations, Foye walks readers through how private equity actually works, from raising funds and acquiring companies to managing portfolios and engineering exits. Clear-eyed and pragmatic, “Private Equity Mastery” translates the jargon and mystique of private equity into a straightforward playbook for understanding the deal-driven world behind it.
The Seeds: Poems
Cecily Parks ’99
Alice James Books, 2025
Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, “The Seeds” finds poet Cecily Parks, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, turning her attention to the uneasy terrain where domestic life meets the natural world. The collection traces the frictions between care and control, from rats in the attic to drought-strained creeks. Drawing on sources as varied as nursery rhymes and “The Odyssey,” Parks reflects on humanity’s persistent effort to shape nature — and nature’s equal insistence on resisting it.
Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century
Bianca Mabute-Louie ’22, ’26
Harper, 2025
In “Unassimilable,” sociologist and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie challenges the long-standing expectation that Asian Americans must fold neatly into mainstream culture. Blending memoir, history and manifesto, the book traces how communities — from Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley ethnoburbs to immigrant churches — have built belonging on their own terms. Mabute-Louie interrogates the “model minority” myth and the politics of assimilation, arguing for a broader vision of identity rooted in diaspora, solidarity and collective care.
Letters to the Jungle: A Memoir of My Family’s War
Alison Whittemore ’78, ’80
BookWrinkle, 2025
“Letters to the Jungle” revisits the turbulent year of 1965, when the author’s father left Oklahoma for a tour in Vietnam and 9-year-old Whittemore, along with her mother, grandmother and sisters, formed a weekly ritual of sending him letters. The surviving epistles — over 250 of them — form the backbone of the book, in which everyday life unfolds alongside the era’s darker headlines of war and other acts of violence. The result is an intimate portrait of a family navigating fear, faith and uncertainty as America changed around them.
The Work and the Water: Labor and Landscapes Along the Erie Canal
Matthew López-Jensen ’02
Inventory Press, 2025
As the Erie Canal’s first artist-in-residence in its 200-year history, Matthew López-Jensen traveled its 524 miles, photographing locks, levees and working landscapes. In “The Work and the Water,” he thoughtfully documents the overlooked labor that keeps the Erie Canal running. His meditative images are paired with handwritten notes from the canal’s workers who maintain the system year-round, often in harsh conditions. The result is part photographic archive and part oral history of one of America’s most consequential waterways.
From the Spring 2026 issue of Rice Magazine