Crazy to think that it's been 3 years since I received this ARC (going through my backlist titles to finally clean things up!) but it was certainly well worth the wait.

Mask has a wonderful storytelling ability on a subject that most wouldn't find interesting. How did addresses actually come about? Do societies have issues because of addressing? Mask delves in to the social, economic and political results that addressing can have on a country/area.

I had no idea how addresses came to be, and I learned so much about addresses per culture, society, etc. We learn about addressing issues in India, the efficient system of addressing in Europe, and also the issues that homeless members of society have without an actual physical address.

If you're looking for a non-fiction book to read up on a subject that you know nothing about, this would be the one! I can't wait to read other reference books that Mask has mentioned in her book to further my knowledge on this subject!

REVIEW—The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power | Deirdre Mask

In “The Address Book,” Deirdre Mask addresses how where we live—and how those places are organized—impacts our lives.

Using world cities as a starting point for each chapter, Mask explores various topics: how street addresses transform slums, where street names come from, how street names and addresses are impacted by politics, how they shape our perceptions of our hometowns, what they reveal about race, how one can live without an address, and a look towards the future of street addresses and place naming.

This book is extraordinarily interesting. It is one of my favorite types of nonfiction: one that takes a concept that is tremendously familiar and even mundane—street names and house numbers—and completely changes how I think about them. There are so many facets to the street address: what it says about where we live, that place’s history and values to how difficult it can be to operate in the world without a permanent address, from having to give directions via landmarks to not being able to get a job or social services due to a lack of address. And Philadelphia was featured in one chapter, so it was great to learn more about the history of our new home and its grid system.

I would absolutely recommend this to anyone looking to learn more about the world. Mask’s writing is clear and engaging. She brings in personal stories in addition to her research that make each chapter’s topic shine.

Overall: A fascinating look into a seemingly simple aspect of life: the street address. ★★★★½.

This was one of those excellent nonfiction books with tidbits that you just can't wait to tell your partner, so you blurt them out while he's watching Bosch, thus annoying the snot out of him. But the factual tidbits are just too good! All in all, a pretty darn enjoyable read.

A great book. A wonderful resource for educating. I highly recommend this book. A great add for any class on race.

Fascinating fun engaging read.A look at how important the places addresses areas we live in are to our lives.So well written researched will be recommending .& gifting to friends who will love this book,#netgalley#st.martins

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Unfortunately while the subject matter of the book was very intriguing to me the book itself could not keep my interest

THE ADDRESS BOOK by Deirdre Mask explores "What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power." Mask looks at situations over time and around the world (Europe (London, Vienna, Berlin, ancient Rome), Haiti, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, and South Africa), concluding that a street name and number signifies much more than merely ensuring mail and package delivery. In fact, she reveals that "most households in the world don't have street addresses" and tells numerous stories while exploring the development, origins and politics involved with street names. Each of her chapters is headed with a city and a question so, for example, Mask looks at "Philadelphia: Why do Americans Love Numbered Streets?" and "St. Louis: What Do Martin Luther King Jr. Streets Reveal about Race in America?" This debut work is a fascinating look at history, economics and society, a non-fiction book filled with unusual facts (e.g., Second Street is the most common street name in America). THE ADDRESS BOOK received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly.

‘The Address Book’ was fascinating and thought provoking. Addresses are something most of us give little thought to but contain so much in them. They often reflect our societal values and connect us to governments, services, and even jobs. Mask uses excellent examples to support her points about identity, race, wealth, and power in this well-organized text. Mask writes in a way that is very accessible, entertaining, eye-opening, and often thought-provoking. Some parts had me laughing so hard, like the chapter that included possibly offensive British street names; and then had me considering the persisting legacy of the Confederacy in the United States following the Civil War or how best we can prevent catastrophic diseases from spreading by using addresses. This book briefly covers so many different topics all over the world and makes me want to learn more.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing this ARC.

Growing up in very rural Iowa, my address was Rural Route 1. I was always so jealous of other addresses that my friends or family members had. They had house numbers and street names like Elm or Washington. My sister lived on Switch Street. Then not too long before I moved out and headed off to college, my parents finally got a “real” address. Due to 911 coming to our area, every house had to have an actual house number and street address. All the gravel roads around our house that we knew by family names were finally given actual street signs and the houses had signs along the road with house numbers. My parent’s farm finally had an address, Fox Road. I now live in a small town, actually on Main St, and still love my address and remember how much I hated not having one.

There are many other people in our country and world that don’t have an address because they are homeless or the town/city/country they live in doesn’t have a system for addressing homes or a grid for street names. I know that seems incredible in this day and age, but especially in slums, there are projects happening now to actually give each shack, tent, or space an address in places like Kolkata or Haiti. Because, as we all know, every form you ever fill out needs an address. Usually, the first two questions are name and then address. Not having an address makes it hard to apply for jobs, housing, or financial assistance. In the homeless shelter I used to work in, clients both of our day program and those who resided there, were able to use our building address on applications and then stop by to check for their mail. But, it gave them that first step they needed to be successful, an address.

This book was eye opening in relation to the number of places in our world that still don’t use a street grid/address system that most of the cities and towns and counties in the US use today. I have never really thought about how difficult it must be for an outsider to try to find a restaurant or hotel assuming that numbers always move consecutively or that a street doesn’t have several different names all on one stretch.

I also found the naming of streets to be quite political and can say a lot about a community, again, something I’ve never thought about. If in Scotland, you live on London Road, you tend to feel less Scottish. If you live Church Street, does that mean you are religious or do you hope to become religious because you live there? It took a campaign for London residents of Butt Hole Lane to change their street name to Archers Way. Really? How can that not be an obvious thing that needs to be changed? In Germany, many street names were named after Nazi officers. Obviously, there has been a push to change those street names over the years.

When I send Christmas cards every year to our family and friends, I love writing all the various street names like Spring Meadow Place or Island View Dr. Don’t they just conjure up a beautiful place? Surprisingly, no one in my address book has an address that makes me cringe.

Because there are still places in our world without an actual address, a new company called What3Words has come up with a 3-meter-square for every spot in the world, whether it is in the middle of a jungle or a houseboat on a lake. Every 3-meter-square has a named location with three words. The founders came up with 40,000 words which then can make up 64 trillion 3-word combinations. So every location is unique. If you have the app, you can look up a 3-meter-square exact location with the three names it has been assigned. For example, cooled.swoop.fitness or baked.crumbling.necks. Find out your specific location with the what3words app. It’s kind of fun!

Overall, I found this book pretty interesting with lots of facts and history to maybe pull out during a conversation or use it in your next family trivia as I did. If you like books that introduce you to a new topic or help you think differently about our world, you may want to add this book to your list.

Before I started reading, my thought was "this is going to be really fantastic or really not." I am excited to say it is phenomenal. Ms. Mask shows how extremely important having an address is: as an identity, for connection, for health and public safety. One of my favorite, and definitely the most interesting, books of the year!

4.5 stars rounded up to 5

Deirdre Mask shares her solid research in an informative story telling manner. The story starts with emergency personnel not being able to find addresses. “Addresses aren’t just for emergency services. They also exist so people can find you, police you, tax you, and try to sell you things you don’t need through the mail.” She learned that street names are about identity, wealth and race. But most of all, street names “are about power – the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.” This book is timely with both with the current staying at home time and the Black Lives Matter movement.

I had never thought much about addresses. My mom had the same one for over 60 years. Without an address it’s almost impossible to get a bank account, and consequently to save or borrow money or receive a pension or social security. Slums in India, as well as places in rural America still lack addresses. Research has found a correlation between street addresses and income. Addresses help people feel more connected to their community. A billion people in slums all over the world do not have an address.

Addresses made it possible to uncover disease patterns. Early street names were often practical – Church Street, Lake Street. Some alleys where brothels were have since been renamed due to words too raunchy for this review.

Mask sprinkles her research with fascinating facts. Britain’s Royal Mail became one of the largest and most efficient bureaucracies in the world, delivering mail 7 times a day in London. In WWII British booksellers burned city maps in case of a German invasion. “House numbers advanced principles of the Enlightenment: rationality and equality. Cities should be easy to navigate, and people easy to find. Taxes could be collected, criminals found quickly. And a peasant’s home was numbered the same way as an aristocrat’s.” Early in the process, peasants painted over their assigned house numbers. Some felt numbering was dehumanizing. As the military officers painted numbers in Vienna, they began listening to the people and improvements were made. (Imagine!)

Other interesting chapters cover Philadelphia, Korea and Japan, Iran and South Africa, St. Louis and Berlin. Mask weaves in some personal stories, but they never overshadow the well-told research. She talks about vanity street names and homelessness. Try getting a job if you don’t have an address. It’s one of the first things on most job applications.

I highly recommend this book to history lovers, readers wanting to know about addresses and race and to anyone who appreciates fascinating research told in a well-crafted story.

If you are house hunting do you care about the name of the street the house you are looking at is on? Do you know how complex the history of house numbers and street names is? And you do know how much of the world is denied access to services due to a lack of address? This was a slow read for me. But I kept coming back to this one because I never knew that house numbers, street names, and urban planning could be so interesting. Interlacing facts and stories, this book pulls you into the importance of the labels we put on the places we live. And how political addresses really are. Every chapter made me stop and consider something, and that alone makes this book worth the read.

In The Address Book, Deidre Mask explores the implications of something most of us never think much about: street addresses - who has them, who doesn't and what that means in day to day life.
All over the world, in places as diverse as the poor sections of India's cities to the countryside of West Virginia, people live without official addresses, which impacts them in myriad ways: how does an ambulance find where you are? Can you vote? Go to school? Be counted in a census? Receive help from social service agencies? In many cases, the answer is no.
The tension between governments pinning people to an official address and fear of that government being able to track and count you is a theme in several chapters. Fear of government control and the desire to partake of the benefits of such a scheme tilt back and forth throughout the book. What happens when a government decides to "officially" name all the streets, even though local citizens have been calling their streets by locally endowed name for decades? What happens when politics gets involved?
A thought-provoking read, and really interesting to boot.

An excellent book about an unlikely subject -- street addresses. Through this lens many subjects of importance are explored -- history, poverty, race, and class. I horoughky enjoyed this book.

I was given a pre-pub edition by NetGalley.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It's a great mix of sociology, history, economics, and politics written in an engaging style.

“An address, today, is an identity”. The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power is a thought-provoking walk all over the world as we learn about what addresses mean throughout history and in different cultures.
.
You’ll find out how addresses can lift people out of poverty, why some people don’t want them at all, how governments have tried to assign addresses successfully and unsuccessfully, how street names tie into history, and how money can buy you an address.
.
Thanks to @netgalley and @stmartinspress for the e-ARC.

The Address Book - Deirdre Mask (4/14)

5 / 5 Stars

** Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and of course, Deirdre Mask for an ARC in exchange for an honest review


Do you ever think back on a certain place you lived (maybe your childhood?), and instantly remember the street, everyone who lived there, what it was like to walk it daily, and what it means to you? Have you also thought about the thoughts that come to mind for others when they hear your address? Are there negatives or positives? In my case, I have both.

I grew up in suburbia, and my actual zip code is considered wealthier than its next-door neighbors. When my parents moved in in 1997 - the house was considered normal in size to others around. But after the 2008 recession, my house, and others around it entered a weird new normal. What was considered middle class was now overly fancy and upper class. I found myself apologizing or making self-deprecating statements for where I lived when friends dropped me off. “Oh, my parents bought this house when the economy wasn’t failing.” But why was I apologizing? When the neighborhood I had grown up in was something so incredibly beautiful to how I remember my childhood. The social status that comes with an address is an interesting focus and Mask’s The Address Book does an amazing job focusing on the social history attached to these 4 lines on documents and envelopes.

When thinking of street addresses, it’s normally simple, right? ___ lives on ___ etc etc. But what happens when there isn’t a straightforward address? Considering for America, street addresses started in Colonial Philadelphia thanks to the Grid system, the concept is something we are so used to but so new in the world. Other nations have their own form of street addresses. Not all are the same. Mask’s work focuses on this point from a global perspective. Broken up into 5 subsections of Development, Origins, Politics, Race and Class/Status Mask provides an interesting and deeply researched dive into the life of a street address beyond what we know it as.

From Kolkata to Vienna, Philadelphia to Iran, Florida with an argument about the former American Confederacy and its influence in the Southern USA to South Africa - Mask provides an incredible wealth of knowledge one would not think could come from a street address.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in learning more about how our everyday normal depicts our role in society.

I picked up this urban-planning adjacent book at the suggestion of multiple readers who knew of my obsession with urban planning. Mask's thorough exploration of the hidden history and meanings of the street address take her all the way from ancient Rome to contemporary U.S. cities. I found this fascinating, illuminating, highly relevant, and surprisingly timely: a recurring theme in the book is the role of street addresses in identifying and stopping epidemics.

This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a long time. The importance of an address and the amount of effort that goes into getting one is amazing. It seems so trivial in the developed world or in an urban setting. But in so many parts of the world, it could be a means to a better life elsewhere.
I look forward to reading more from this author.