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

By Deirdre Mask

Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2021
A TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020
Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Award 2020

'Deirdre Mask's book was just up my Strasse, alley, avenue and boulevard.' -Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type

'Fascinating ... intelligent but thoroughly accessible ... full of surprises' - Sunday Times

When most people think about street addresses they think of parcel deliveries, or visitors finding their way. But who numbered the first house, and where, and why? What can addresses tell us about who we are and how we live together?
Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., how ancient Romans found their way, and why Bobby Sands is memorialised in Tehran. She explores why it matters if, like millions of people today, you don't have an address.
From cholera epidemics to tax hungry monarchs, Mask discovers the different ways street names are created, celebrated, and in some cases, banned. Full of eye-opening facts, fascinating people and hidden history, this book shows how addresses are about identity, class and race. But most of all they are about power: the power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn't, and why.

'A must read for urbanists and all those interested in cities and modern economic and social life.' - Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Apr 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781782833789

Deirdre Mask

Deirdre Mask graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude, and attended University of Oxford before returning to Harvard for law school, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She completed a master’s in writing at the National University of Ireland. The author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Deirdre's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. Originally from North Carolina, she has taught at Harvard and the London School of Economics. She lives with her husband and daughters in London.

Reviews for The Address Book

[bookanonjeff · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Compelling Yet Not Complete. Mask tells some excellent stories about various issues early in the development of various features and issues with an address, and does so in a way that is very easy to read. That noted, at times (such as during the discussion of how house numbers came to be) she outright admits that several things "seemingly happened at once" and that she went with the story she prefers herself - as opposed to what actually happened first, presumably. It was these little tidbits here and there that were just enough to warrant removing a star - still a compelling and interesting book, but not as factually accurate as it arguably could have been. Still good enough for a general overview of the subject, but I'm not sure I'd want to go up against a Postmaster General in address trivia based on just reading this book. Still, as noted, a very easy and very informative read and thus very much recommended.

[nielsengw_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Deirdre Mask's Address Book is a look into what happens when the regular privilege of having an address no longer exists. Without an address, the community can't find you, help can't find you, and you don't register as having a place in the world. Address queries are on job applications, so finding a job becomes more daunting. Goods and services can't be transported to you. Luckily, though, there are agencies trying to solve this problem, and Mask talks about their missions, their histories, and their pitfalls towards getting addresses to matter and getting the public at large to understand the power of addresses. I enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it.

[deldevries · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What if you didn't have an address? Covered nicely from around the world and over time, up to the current day homeless person. Google Plus Codes are an answer with the open source: Open Location Code. A geocode system for identifying an area anywhere on the Earth. Interesting back in eighteenth century France, Guillante's filing cabinet, the original Big Data, was designed to keep detailed records about everyone based on where you lived and minute details about all aspects of your life and behavior. "It will become possible to know what becomes of each individual from his birth to his last breath."

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’ve had a heightened awareness of street addresses lately as a result of shipping errors to my address during the Christmas season. In one case, a package was misdelivered to my address, and in the other case, a package was correctly delivered to my address but directed to a person unknown to me. Both situations required a fair bit of effort to resolve. So, I was already thinking about addresses and problems associated with them.Mask takes a wider view of street addresses, including the problems that arise from the lack of a street address. Mask structures the book in sections for development, origins, politics, race, and class and status. Most of the chapter names are cities or countries, and some are a bit misleading. For instance, the chapter titled “Iran: Why do street names follow revolutionaries?” talks mostly about Northern Ireland, using Tehran’s Bobby Sands street as a jumping off point.The book is similar to the kinds of articles you’d find in Smithsonian Magazine. It raises awareness of the social problems surrounding street names and addresses, and it spotlights individuals and organizations that are working to solve these problems. While Mask stops short of advocating particular remedies, perhaps her readers will be inspired to awareness and action at the local level.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Deirdre Mask, who writes for publications such as the New Yorker and Atlantic, toured the world, coming up with information on the influence street addresses wield. She discusses the origins of street addresses and different systems used around the world. Japan uses blocks instead of streets. She (and others) attribute it to the way persons learn writing in various cultures. She goes on to discuss the role politics and race play in the process. She then turns to a discussion of social strata by showing how the elite purchase custom addresses and how homeless persons fail to move beyond their circumstances by lack of an address. At the end she discusses the future of addresses by looking at emerging trends using big data. While parts of the book were interesting, the book did not engage me as I hoped it would. I tend to dislike books that rely more on journalistic perspectives bringing the first person into the discussion of a possible academic topic. While the book was more engaging than an academic tome might be, the first person perspective creates a distrust of information presented, particularly in this day of blind endnotes. The book used these detested blind endnotes. Many of these referred to web articles rather than academic publications. The book included an index. One of the book's weaknesses was a failure to examine rural America adequately. While she examined some names in rural West Virginia, she did not look at the many places where roads are simply numbered with "County Road XXX" with XXX being a number. She simply failed to look at the rest of the country for patterns. I conclude that those who name streets should refrain from naming them after persons. Someone heroic to one generation may represent something else entirely to future generations.

[jonerthon-437513 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a highly anticipated planning title, and I feel very lucky I was able to get a library ebook copy soon after its release. The author stitches together stories about how physical addresses have an impact on people in multiple countries, and makes a compelling case for why our world has become complex enough that people without them are at a distinct disadvantage. The most resonant of these stories for me are related to rural America, as my (geographically enormous but sparse) home county had to implement street names early in the 21st century in order to keep emergency response functioning as intended. It was a bit fun that the residents of those previously unnamed roads got to provide input on street names, as do some of Mask's subjects in West Virginia. Anyhow, this is recommended for anyone with a curiosity about geography or the infrastructure systems that humans have developed. The real lesson is that we haven't fully or evenly developed them when it comes to physical addressing, but there is promise when we choose to complete that task.

[tytania-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't know exactly what to expect from a book all about addresses, but I was still disappointed. I feel it lacked focus. I mean, it was all over the map. HA HA HAI was pulled in by the story of the efforts to give everyone in West Virginia an address - how hard it was to find people, as apparently roads don't have names outside of a few major cities. And darned if the guy whose job it was to name all the roads didn't dang run out of names long before he was through!I think my favorite quote was about some elderly Chinese immigrants who referred to streets that their new tenant didn't recognize. "Mulberry Street, with its many funeral homes, had turned into Dead Person Street... Division Street was Hatsellers Street, Rutgers Street was Garbage Street, and Kosciuszko Bridge, named after a Polish leader who fought in the American Revolutionary War, somehow became 'the Japanese Guy Bridge.'"I'm gonna call it that from now on.

[nyiper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Deirdre Mask did a tremendous amount of work to produce this exhaustive and fully researched explanation of where and how addresses have come from historically. Her travels and conversations with an extraordinary number of people were truly exhaustive. I was fascinated how much overlap there was in the other current book, Caste, I just finished. Both are amazing in the depth of information they provide. Mask manages to add some humorous personal comments along the way as she describes her investigations. There is SO much more TO an address, or the lack of one, than one would ever imagine without reading Mask's book. It is not exactly a book you would pick up from the title but it is SO worth reading!!!

[trav_14 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Address Book addresses far flung topics, political issues, race relations, and biology, illustrating how our sense of place ties into our brain’s memories of places and the development of the hippocampus or relating tales of how streets got their names, it all seems relevant to us today. I found The Address Book to be a fast read and while there were a few areas I would’ve enjoyed diving deeper on, the book doesn’t blow anything out of proportion. Which I very much appreciate. It’s full of cultural geographers, historians, epidemiologists, and first hand interviews plus the author’s own experience and thoughts.This book was sent to me as an advanced galley (with no expectation of review). But I really enjoyed it and I give The Address Book 5 out 5 stars and have been recommending this book to just about everyone. It’s a well done and informative read about something so many of us are privileged enough to take for granted.

[davidwineberg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The simple street address is not only a relatively new concept, it is controversial everywhere it is implemented. Deirdre Mask has spent years traveling and discovering how people get on without addresses, how different implementations work (or don't), how addresses have figured in history, and how the digital world wants to change it all. She has put it together in her charming and engaging The Address Book.The even/odd address system that most Americans are so accustomed to began in Philadelphia just three hundred years ago. It works, and yet Chicago had to to invent its own system 200 years later. The Japanese number blocks and not houses (and they are not alone in that). Some assign numbers by the year the building went up instead of sequentially. And many, many places still have no identifying systems in place at all. Mask uses the example of ancient Rome, a metropolis of a million, where without addresses, directions to find anyone or anything were, to put it mildly, involved. And yet, the city functioned as no other before it. Somewhat less functional was her experience in modern-day West Virginia, where a lack of street names and addresses led her to ask numerous people for directions, and still failing, had someone lead her almost there.While that might seem unreasonable in a connected world, it does mean that locals become experts. Their knowledge grows vast, having to know people, landmarks, ruins, individual trees, people's homes, and what might have been there along the way before. Mask points out that GPS requires almost no brain power, and Americans use less and less of it make their way anywhere anymore.In western society at least, not having a street address is fatal. It's essentially impossible to open a bank account, obtain a legitimate ID, rent an apartment, or get a job without one. This artificial prejudice is primarily a legal complication, of course. The government wants everyone to be traceable, for income tax purposes, for criminal pursuit, and for good old control. The unintended consequences include marginalizing an already marginal group, for life. Once they fall into that trap, there is rarely escape. Schemes to allow the homeless to use the address of a shelter, or vacant housing, have gone nowhere. If you don't have a street address, you are a non-entity. In the UK, organizations like the National Health Service and Unemployment services persist in using snail mail. If you don't get the letter and miss your appointment, it's curtains. You are canceled. She says: "Without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it's often people who don't know you who can most help you." Address data is problematic. It has many great uses, but also dark sides. Addresses can mark people as living in bad districts, or racially dominated districts, poor or rich, religiously focused or mixed. Assumptions are assumed, loans approved or denied, interest rates lowered or raised, 911 calls answered or not, depending on the address attached. In the attempts over the years to assign addresses, people did not want them because they didn't want the junk mail, or to be followed or trackable. Freedom from street addresses is very real for some. Long before there were National ID numbers and Social Security Numbers to protest, there were street addresses that primarily benefited the monarch, the police and the tax collector.The Address Book wanders globally and throughout history, with Mask injecting history lessons with great storytelling abilities. She tells the stories of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, of Marie-Theresa of Austria, the slums of Kolkata, how European Jews got their last names and navigating Tokyo all by their connections to street names and numbers. Mask says the discussion of street names and numbers can dominate local politics, shooting to the top of the agenda when up for discussion. This can be a near daily thing in New York or Paris, where renaming is all but constant. Or it can happen when a community wants to remove Confederate names in the USA, or Nazi names in Germany. Some will cling to tradition and claim they will be lost otherwise. Some don't like the replacements. Developers will maneuver to obtain chic addresses, forcing the current user to change everything. It's always a struggle. This seems to be particularly true of England, where the original street names could be particularly descriptive of what went on there, in a very raw and crude sense. Today, those names add character, and higher valuations. Lane tops Boulevard in sales pricing, and embarrassing names can cause sales to take forever. I for one have long joked I could never live at the corner of Tinker Bell Boulevard and Goofy Gulch in a Disney development. On the other hand, living at Mortgage Heights and Default Drive is no privilege either.For the near future, companies like Google and what3words are creating global systems that computers (of course) generate. What3words, for example, has divided the planet into three-metre (10 ft) squares, each labeled by three common words. Look up a three word combo on its website, and the map function takes you to a very specific spot that needs no further description. Sadly, it is in English, which does not work for everyone . So the company is developing other language systems, and you will have to know what language the three word are in and choose that subsystem in order for it to work. Google is doing the same thing with a seven digit code that is most unmemorable. Unlike The Address Book, which is a delight, it kinda takes the romance and character out of it.David Wineberg