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Book Summary and Reviews of Life in Year One by Scott Korb

Life in Year One by Scott Korb

Life in Year One

What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine

by Scott Korb

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  • Published:
  • Mar 2010, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

For anyone who's 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.

What was it like to live during the time of Jesus?
Where did people live?
Who did they marry?
And what was family life like?
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 reader 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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Korb’s vivid, breezy prose makes accessible a mountain of scholarship that illuminates the past." - Publishers Weekly

"A generally historical, fun look at life during the time of Jesus ... An accessible, light-pedaling survey." - Kirkus Reviews

This information about Life in Year One was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Scott Korb

Scott Korb is the coauthor of The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and graduate degrees from Union Seminary and Columbia university. His work has appeared in Harper's, Gastronomica, The Revealer, and Commonweal.

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