It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree
A.J. Jacobs, 2017
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476734491
Summary
A.J. Jacobs undergoes a hilarious, heartfelt quest to understand what constitutes family — where it begins and how far it goes — and attempts to untangle the true meaning of the "Family of Humankind.
A.J. Jacobs has received some strange emails over the years, but this note was perhaps the strangest: "You don’t know me, but I’m your eighth cousin. And we have over 80,000 relatives of yours in our database."
That’s enough family members to fill Madison Square Garden four times over. Who are these people, A.J. wondered, and how do I find them? So began Jacobs’s three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history.
Jacobs’s journey would take him to all seven continents. He drank beer with a US president, found himself singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and unearthed genetic links to Hollywood actresses and real-life scoundrels. After all, we can choose our friends, but not our family.
Now Jacobs upends, in ways both meaningful and hilarious, our understanding of genetics and genealogy, tradition and tribalism, identity and connection. It’s All Relative is a fascinating look at the bonds that connect us all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1968
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—Brown University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Arnold Stephen "A. J." Jacobs Jr. is an American journalist, author, and lecturer best known for writing about his lifestyle experiments. He is the editor at large for Esquire and has worked for Entertainment Weekly.
Early life
Jacobs was born in New York City to Arnold Jacobs Sr., a lawyer, and Ellen Kheel. He has one sister, Beryl Jacobs. He was educated at The Dalton School and Brown University.
Career
Jacobs has said that he sees his life as a series of experiments in which he immerses himself in a project or lifestyle, for better or worse, then writes about what he learned. The genre is often called immersion journalism or "stunt journalism."
In one of these experiments ("stunts") Jacobs read all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He wrote about it in his humorous book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004). In the book, he also chronicles his personal life along with various endeavors like joining Mensa. The book spent eight weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. NPR's Weekend Edition ran a series of segments featuring the unusual facts Jacobs learned in each letter. The book received positive reviews in the New York Times, Time magazine, and USA Today. Joe Queenan, however, panned it in his New York Times book review. Queenan called the book "corny, juvenile, smug, tired" and "interminable" and characterized Jacobs as "a prime example of that curiously modern innovation: the pedigreed simpleton." Four months later, Jacobs responded in an essay entitled "I Am Not a Jackass."
In 2005 Jacobs out-sourced his life to India such that personal assistants would do everything for him from answering his e-mails, reading his children good-night stories, and arguing with his wife. Jacobs wrote about it in an Esquire article called "My Outsourced Life" (2005). The article was excerpted in The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. Jacobs also talked about his outsourcing experiences on a Moth storytelling podcast.
In another experiment Jacobs wrote an article for Esquire called "I Think You're Fat" (2007), about the experiment he conducted with Radical Honesty, a lifestyle of total truth-telling promoted by Virginia therapist Brad Blanton, whom Jacobs interviewed for the article.
Jacobs' book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007) chronicles his experiment to live for one year according to all the moral codes expressed in the Bible, including stoning adulterers, blowing a shofar at the beginning of every month, and refraining from trimming the corners of his facial hair (which he followed by not trimming his facial hair at all). The book spent 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and Jacobs gave a TED talk about what he learned during the project. In May 2017, CBS Television picked up a TV series based on the book. It was renamed By the Book for television.
The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment (2009) is a series of first person essays about his experiences with various guides for human behavior.
Jacobs is also author of The Two Kings: Elvis and Jesus (1994), an irreverent comedic comparison of Elvis Presley and Jesus; and America Off-Line (1996). He also writes for mental floss, a trivia magazine.
In 2012 he released Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection in which he explores different ways humans can bring their bodies to peak health, from diet to exercise. He wrote the book while walking on a treadmill. Jacobs gave a related TED talk about this health quest entitled "How Healthy Living Nearly Killed Me."
From 2011 to 2012, Jacobs wrote the "Extreme Health" column for Esquire magazine, covering such topics as high-intensity interval training and the quantified self. Since 2012, he has written the "Modern Problems" advice column for mental floss magazine. The column compares modern day life to the horrors of the past.
Starting in May, 2013, Jacobs has written a weekly advice column for Esquire.com called "My Huddled Masses." The column is crowd sourced to Jacobs’s 100,000 Facebook followers, who give etiquette and love advice. He also writes the regular feature "Obituaries" for Esquire, which consists of satirical death notices for cultural trends, such as American hegemony.
As of 2015 Jacobs was working on a project called the Global Family Reunion, where he aims to connect as many people as possible to the global family tree at Geni.com and WikiTree. He hosted the Global Family Reunion, planned to be largest family reunion in history on June 6, 2015, at the New York Hall of Science.
On December 5, 2016, Gimlet Media announced Jacobs as the host of Twice Removed, a podcast focused on genealogy. The project also inspired his book, It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree (2017).
Personal
Jacobs is married to Julie Schoenberg and has three sons. He is a cousin to pop singer Michael Jackson by thirty-three generations. The family lives in New York City, New York.
Jacobs is a member of Giving What We Can and pledges 10% of lifelong earnings to charity. He donates to the Against Malaria Foundation and other effective altruism organizations. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/25/2017.)
Book Reviews
Whether he’s posing as a celebrity, outsourcing his chores, or adhering strictly to the Bible, we love reading about the wacky lifestyle experiments of author A.J. Jacobs
Entertainment Weekly
[Jacobs] infuses humor throughout the book but relies too heavily on the same gimmick of his unexpected relations (he’s 14 steps removed from Joseph Stalin, and George H.W. Bush is his second cousin’s husband’s eighth cousin three times removed). The result is a somewhat amusing and educational account of the science and culture of families.
Publishers Weekly
[T]he author becomes fascinated with genealogy.… Written with Jacobs's signature humor and warmth, this is a fun, if slightly scattershot, adventure that will interest many. … [E]ngrossing, funny, and optimistic. —Jennifer Stout, Virginia Commonwealth Univ. Lib., Richmond
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Whimsical but also full of solid journalism and eye-opening revelations about the history of humanity, the book is a real treat.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Whether the author is being ruminative or rollicking, he is consistently thought-provoking in his "adventure in helping to build the World Family Tree," and his natural gift for humor lightens the mood of even the most serious discussion. A delightful, easy-to-read, informative book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for It's All Relative … then take off on your own:
1. What did you find most surprising in A.J. Jacob's It's All Relative?
2. Talk about some of these issues that Jacobs raises in his book:
♦ Why males seem to dominate family trees;
♦ The impact of American slavery on family history;
♦ The difficulties of working with the Mormon archive;
♦ The reliability of DNA testing as a genealogical tool;
♦ How nonhuman creatures fit into the story of our genealogy;
♦ The Biblical creation story of Adam and Eve as the beginning of the human race;
♦ How Neanderthals and homo sapiens are related.
3. Talk about the issues surrounding privacy when it comes to our personal genetics. How concerned is Jacobs and how deeply does he cover this subject? How concerned are you?
4. What do you find particularly entertaining, even humorous, about Jacob's book. In other words, what made you laugh?
5. Have you initiated your own genealogical search for your family history? If so, what have been your results so far?
6. Have you taken away any particular message after reading It's All Relative? Is there a chance for greater respect among different populations? Or do you sense that tribal identities and strife will win out?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)