Check out MoCo residents in print and on TV

Watch: The Greatest Night in Pop, a buzzy new Netflix documentary that chronicles the Jan. 28, 1985, all-star recording session of “We Are the World” to benefit famine relief in Africa, is a must-watch for all ’80s kids. Directed by Bao Nguyen, who was born in Silver Spring and graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in 2001, the film includes interviews with some of the 46 artists who gathered on that legendary night, including Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis.

Read: No matter how meticulously politicians try to sanitize their views or portray themselves in the most flattering ways, Bethesda’s Carlos Lozada says there’s a lot to learn about who they are from carefully reading things they’ve written. The former Washington Post book critic has assembled a collection of his essays in The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians (Simon & Schuster, February 2024). “This genre of literature, which is often looked down upon, is actually extremely rich and revealing,” the Pulitzer Prize winner says. 

Binge: A fan of The Amazing Race since she was a kid, Kishori Turner says it was a dream come true to compete on the 36th season of the CBS reality show, which concluded on May 15. The 26-year-old graduate of Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg and American University in Washington, D.C., was selected based on an audition video with Karishma Cordero (above right), her 22-year-old cousin from Texas, to race around the world against a dozen other teams. “It is so much harder than it looks,” Turner says. “It was definitely the adventure of a lifetime.” 

Discover: David Finkel describes Brent Cummings as a “classic patriot.” The two met in 2007, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning Silver Spring journalist was embedded in Cummings’ Army combat unit during the Iraq War. Finkel went on to follow the Georgia resident from 2016 to 2021 to tell the story of the country’s moral reckoning through Cummings’ experience in An American Dreamer (Random House, February 2024). “It’s a journey book about a good person trying not to surrender to what was going on,” Finkel says, “but find ways to live with the values that he was taught and he believes in.” 

Reading List:

Here were the most-requested books at the Montgomery County Public Library system in March 2024: 

This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.