Synopses & Reviews
What was it like to live during the time of Jesus? Where did people live? Who did they marry? What was family life like? And how did people survive?
These are just some of the questions that Scott Korb answers in this engaging new book, which explores what everyday life entailed two thousand years ago in first-century Palestine, that tumultuous era when the Roman Empire was at its zenith and a new religion—Christianity—was born.
Culling information from primary sources, scholarly research, and his own travels and observations, Korb explores the nitty-gritty of real life back then—from how people fed, housed, and groomed themselves to how they kept themselves healthy. He guides the contemporary listener through the maze of customs and traditions that dictated life under the numerous groups, tribes, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean that Rome governed two thousand years ago, and he illuminates the intriguing details of marriage, family life, health, and a host of other aspects of first-century life. The result is a book for everyone, from the armchair traveler to the amateur historian. With surprising revelations about politics and medicine, crime and personal hygiene, this book is smart and accessible popular history at its very best.
Review
"Easygoing in pace, Morey's narration is more conversational than dramatic, a style that makes this detailed work accessible and interesting from the beginning." ---AudioFile
Synopsis
For anyone who has ever pondered what everyday life was like during the time of Jesus comes a lively and illuminating portrait of the nearly unknown world of daily life in first-century Palestine.
About the Author
Scott Korb, a writer and documentary editor, has been published in Harper's, Gastronomica, Commonweal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Baltimore Sun. He is coauthor, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us and associate editor of the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, the first and possibly only papers collection that will ever exist of a woman held in slavery. Scott earned master's degrees from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University and currently teaches at New York University. Arthur Morey has performed in theaters and cabarets in New York, Chicago, and Milan. He freelanced scripts for Paramount and ABC-TV and won awards for both plays and fiction. A former literary manager of Chicago's Body Politic Theatre, he taught acting at Fordham and writing at SUNY Rockland, Northwestern University, and the School of the Art Institute. He edited Viola Spolin for Northwestern University Press and later was managing editor at Renaissance Books in Los Angeles. Winner of a number AudioFile Earphones Awards, he has narrated novels by John Irving, Nathan Englander, Richard Russo, and John Burnam Schwartz, as well as nonfiction by Kurt Eichenwald, John McCain, George Tenet, Deepak Chopra, Gay Talese, and others.