THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE by Peter Brown

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD

Narrated by Fleet Cooper

The Economics of Roman Christianity

I really enjoyed the approach of this history. It is a history of Rome from the fourth to the sixth century from the perspective of the economics of a changing world in a state of flux caused by the rise of Christianity. The importance of Northern Africa to the Roman world was brought out in a way that I have never understood before. The fact that history is made by the rich and powerful is made profoundly clear in this work. The poor and down-trodden leave no mark save for the manner in which the rich are moved to bring them aid. This is a fine book.

Fleet Cooper gets kudos for his excellent diction. I could always understand what he was reading. Some of his odd pronunciation choices, however, rise to the level of annoyance after a time. He has obviously done some study of different languages and he pronounces foreign words with ease. The problem is that he lets this foreign language training influence the way he pronounces words that are to be spoken in a certain way in English. This is pervasively noticeable for names containing the letter “U.” He insists on giving it the long vowel sound even when the short vowel sound is correct. Towards the end the historical figure Pelagius enters the narrative and I had to suffer through many pronunciations of “Pell-ay-gee-OOS” before he began to say it correctly: “Pell-AY-gee-us.” These oddities of pronunciation were a distraction but did not detract from making this an excellent audio book.