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| The History of New Year's Resolutions The custom of making New Year's resolutions has been around for thousands of years, but it hasn't always looked the way it does today. The ancient Babylonians are said to have been the first people to make New Year's resolutions, some 4,000 years ago. They were also the first to hold recorded celebrations in honor of the new year-though for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted. During a massive 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. They also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. These promises could be considered the forerunners of our New Year's resolutions. If the Babylonians kept to their word, their (pagan) gods would bestow favor on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods' favor-a place no one wanted to be. Keep those resolutions and check out these titles |
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| Books on the Air An overview of talked-about books and authors. This weekly update, published every Friday, provides descriptions of recent TV and radio appearances by authors and their recently released books. See the hot titles from the media this week. |
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| In Memoiram-Joan Didion Joan Didion (December 5, 1934-December 23, 2021) was an American writer who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017. Check out her books here. |
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| New Books Happy New Year! Here is the last new release roundup of 2021. Check them out here |
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| To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves-there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.-Joan Didion
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