The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

Today’s Nonfiction post is on The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask. It is 326 pages long and is published by St. Martin’s Press. The cover is a collection of different city maps with the title in the center. The intended reader is someone who is interested in the history of cities, address, race, and power. There is no foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power, and identity.

When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.

In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany. The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we also see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata and on the streets of London.

Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t―and why.

Review- This is a fascinating, insightful, and very well written non-fiction book about the history of street addresses. It starts with the question of why do we need street addresses and what do they give us. To get these answers Mask goes around the world, interviews scores of very different people, from architects to Doctors Without Borders, and the average person to understand the power an address has. In modern-day non-rural America we do not understand the power of having a street address. An address means that you can be found for good or for bad, but that also means that you can get a loan from a bank, you can vote, and perhaps most importantly you can be found by Emergency Services. And that is something that Mask discovers is missing in the more rural parts of the world that do not have standardized or any kind of street addresses. The people there cannot get the help that they need nor do they have a voice in their government. This book is very well written, with good notes so you can do further research if you want, and is really very interesting. I highly recommend this book in order to understand more what's going on in under-served and under-recognized cultures and communities. 

I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.