2020 One Book Selection 'It’s All Relative' Connects Us All

Jan 15, 2020 at 03:45 pm by literacymatters

2020 One Book Selection

Each year Read To Succeed and The Rutherford County One Book Committee, select a book to unify the community. This year, we have selected "It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree" by A.J. Jacobs.

In the non-fiction book, Jacobs tells the tale of his hilarious, heartfelt quest to unite the entire human race in one all-encompassing family tree. Well, it's not just his own quest; It's a historic project involving thousands of researchers and scientists and it's revolutionizing the way we think about race, ethnicity, history and the human species.

A popular theme that Jacob explores in the book is genealogy testing. "About 5 million people have taken genealogy tests and I think we all just want to know where we come from," he said.

When asked whether these tests are bringing us closer together, Jacobs responded, "My hope is yes, once you realize that we are all cousins and that we all share 99.9% of our DNA."

A.J. Jacobs is a New York Times bestselling author of "The Know-It-All" and "The Year of Living Biblically." He is best known for writing about his lifestyle experiments.

Copies of the 2020 One Book can be found around the county at "Book Crossing" locations in conjunction with 5 out of the 8 Coffee Marathon sites, which are marked by one of the Read To Succeed red boxes. Found at City Café, Just Love Coffee East, Just Love Coffee West, Tasty Table, Simply Pure Sweets, Morning Brew, Technology Engagement Center and all the Rutherford County Library System branches, books can be borrowed for free.

In each book, you will find a sticker on the inside cover with information about how to log on to the One Book 2020 Facebook page and share your comments about the book after you've read it. You can pass the copy along to a friend, bring it back to the location where you found it or drop it at any of the other locations.

More information about One Book visit readtosucceed.org/onebook.


About One Book

One Book is a partnership between Read To Succeed, Linebaugh Library, and other Middle Tennessee non-profits and businesses to promote reading and unity in Rutherford County.

Previous One Books were: The Great Santini, Pat Conroy in 2008; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver in 2009; The Soloist, Mark Salzman in 2010; Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson in 2011; The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins in 2012; The Fault in Our Stars, John Green in 2013; The Last Policeman, Ben Winters in 2014; The Rosie Project, Graeme Simsion in 2015; Girls of Atomic City, Denise Kiernan in 2016; and Flight of Dreams by Ariel Lawhon in 2017, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline in 2018, and The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner in 2019.

About Read To Succeed

Read To Succeed improves lives in Rutherford County by offering free literacy programs and events for adults and children. Read To Succeed supports this mission by fostering literacy partnerships between providers, educators, community helpers and business owners. We create events and programming to promote literacy and provide resources such as the Literacy Center. For more information visit www.readtosucceed.org

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