What to watch and read from MoCo locals

It’s not by accident that American neighborhoods are often divided by class, says Richard D. Kahlenberg. Government zoning has created a form of bias against those with less education and income that limits their ability to access good schools and other amenities, says the Rockville author. His book Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See (PublicAffairs, July 2023) tries “to shine a light on a pervasive form of economic discrimination that essentially determines who gets to live where in America,” he says.

Alice McDermott’s ninth novel, Absolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 2023), focuses on two very different American women who lived in 1963 Saigon, Vietnam. Unlike a memoir, fiction allows the characters to purposefully reflect on their experiences, says the Bethesda author. “That’s why the title is Absolution,” she says. “Is there a way to assess who we were at any given point in history or in our own lives, and understand context in a way that allows us to forgive one another for what we didn’t know?” 

ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown has a new host with local roots: Scott Van Pelt. The TV personality grew up in Brookeville and attended Flower Valley Elementary School in Rockville and Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring. Van Pelt has been with ESPN since 2001. He began his new gig at the start of the 2023 NFL season and will continue as host of SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt. The Bethesda resident was slated to be inducted into the Montgomery County Sports Hall of Fame at the end of October.

As a religious studies scholar who grew up in Mississippi, Robert P. Jones of Takoma Park says his new book was partly a personal quest to disentangle the role of white supremacy and Christianity in the development of the country. The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (Simon & Schuster, Sept. 2023) looks at church doctrine used centuries ago to justify the conquest of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans, and how it connects to contemporary ways people are reckoning with this history. 

Fiction

•  Lovelight Farms | B.K. Borison
•  Above Ground | Clint Smith
•  The Late Americans | Brandon Taylor
•  Nigeria Jones | Ibi Zoboi
•  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Gabrielle Zevin
•  Roaming | Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
•  Yellowface | R.F. Kuang

Nonfiction

•  Pageboy: A Memoir | Elliot Page
•  A Living Remedy: A Memoir | Nicole Chung
• Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law | Richard Rothstein and Leah Rothstein
•  All About Love | Bell Hooks
• A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining | Rachel E. Cargle
• Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital | Elise Hu
• Dancing in the Darkness: Spiritual Lessons for Thriving in Turbulent Times | Otis Moss III with Gregory Lichtenberg