It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree

New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, 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.

“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). 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.

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• The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
• The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
• My Life as an Experiment: One Man's Humble Quest to Improve Himself by Living as a Woman, Becoming George Washington, Telling No Lies, and Other Radical Tests
• Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection
• The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
• The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
• Genealogy Standards Second Edition