Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

While reading this book, there was a compelling image in my mind not related to the content and its own implication. I felt like I was watching a game of pinball being played. When I played it on any system, as a kid, I would press every button I could without waiting to see where the ball was and then watch it bounce wildly around. The sequence of narration in this book made me feel like I was watching just that. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because despite that fact I decided I enjoyed the content way too much to give it a lower rating!

The author does try to set broad categories, and within those, there are subcategories with regards to the countries/cities in question. The problem is that there are overlaps in theories, histories and other instances of the same context that are required to be mentioned alongside some other heading and then a detour occurs. I seem to have taken a leaf out of the author's style because I am meandering without talking about the content properly. I will try again. The book is an exciting collection of historical and contemporary politics with a specific point of focus. What does an address mean and what power it holds over the smooth functioning of a society? The author talks about this and more. She covers a broad cross-section of the world, and there were so many minor points hidden between the major ones that I had to read them little by little to savour it. Most of it was new to me, but maybe common knowledge to the people living in those countries. Either way, this is the kind of book that can spark numerous conversations and debates and bring into perspective how the address function in our modern world. Given that for the past month or more, almost the entire world has been limited to having things delivered to their doorstep reading, this might actually be even more fascinating!

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience and my affinity towards factoids.

Ticking my boxes of interesting, well researched non fiction about a subject I'd not previously considered but upon reflection is deserving of consideration. And full of good little factoids to annoy people with.

This was absolutely excellent. I never really thought about the fact that addresses really say so much about politics and our world. Fascinating when you shift the lens slightly, how you can look at the same thing but see something completely different.

I was looking forward to this one and it didn't disappoint me. Such amazing insight, showing how easy it is to make judgements based on context. Loved it and will be recommending it.

Starting with a simple question, 'what do street addresses do?', Deirdre Mask travels the world and back in time to work out how we describe where we live and what that says about us.

This is an interesting book, and it’s made further interesting by the way it is written. Mask’s travelling research and growing passion in the area as the book goes on, makes you feel like you are working on this book with her as she takes you to the streets of Tokyo, Victorian London and the vibrant life of Kolkata. Though read from her perspective, this book highlights the diligent work others are doing to improve the life of others, in ways I never thought of.

The Address Book is a well written, well thought-out journey on the past and present of what makes a home, and it makes for really intriguing reading as everyone right now is confined to their homes. How the author paints the places she goes allows you to feel like you are on that street with her as she gives you a picture of the backroad of Virginia or the hectic streets of Kolkata and that’s what I loved about this book so much getting into it.

A great non-fiction piece.

(I received an ARC from NetGalley for honest review).

A fascinating read and a very clever idea for a book. I enjoyed reading my way round different parts of the world. This is an interesting topic and the author provides some food for thought.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

A fascinating and well researched read that kept me hooked till the end.
I found the style of writing and the topic fascinating and I appreciated the content and the organisation of this book.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Recently, I was at an induction event for my new job, where I met someone from my town. When I described whereabouts I lived, they said something like, “oh, near Stalin Road?” We then explained to our team-mates that the road was built when Stalin was an ally (other roads in the vicinity are Roosevelt Way and Churchill Way) and residents didn’t want to change its name, and swapped memories (mine of delivering papers, theirs of some prefabs that used to be there). Who knew the name of a road could be such a conversation-starter?

It’s certainly something Deirdre Mask knows, as her new non-fiction title The Address Book shows very well indeed. I was attracted to this title when I spotted it on Netgalley because of my love for TV shows such as The Secret History of Our Streets and A House Through Time, my enjoyment of a historical demography module I took as part of my Master’s degree, and my abiding curiosity about the streets I know and how they’ve come into existence and changed.

In The Address Book, Mask takes us around the world and into the past as she explores ‘what street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power’. She talks to experts from a variety of disciplines, and tells the stories of people past and present who have sought to impose order on their cities and Earth at large. Their motivations include making people more findable by emergency and postal services, helping them rise out of poverty, as they need an address to register bank accounts and apply for welfare payments and jobs - or bringing them under the eye of the state, so they can be taxed, conscripted and arrested. Having to give my address on official forms and the like is such a normal part of life for me that I’d never even considered this last reason, so it was extremely interesting to read about people who didn’t want to be assigned an address because of the increased surveillance it would bring.

Another thing about this book that particularly fascinated me was Mask’s discussion of the different ways people map their spaces, from ancient Rome where city-dwellers found their way around using sights, sounds and smells, to modern Japan and Korea, where space is measured in blocks rather than streets.

Mask notes that GPS has diminished our need to navigate by landmarks, as we can use it to find the street we’re looking for quickly and accurately. However, I like to think I’m still using my inner navigational skills to some extent, as whenever I’m about to go somewhere new, I walk the route in Google Streetview so I can recognise buildings (provided they haven’t changed since it was last updated) and be sure I’m going the right way when I’m there in person. It’s a great tool if you get a bit anxious about getting lost! I also love idling around with the option that shows previous images, seeing how scenes have changed since the streets were first photographed.

To return to controversial street names, Mask tells some realy interesting stories about them, and those who support and oppose changing them. On the one side, you’ve got people who want to retain historical links (for instance, a street with the unfortunate moniker ‘Bell End’ was named for a long-gone medieval church referenced in the Domesday Book), celebrate the good things historical figures did even if they weren’t so wholesome in other ways, or just don’t want the hassle of an address change. On the other, there are people who rightly feel affected by living on, or near, streets named after oppressors, and that keeping the names sends the message that they’re not fully accepted where they live.

Mask additionally discusses the confusion that arises when streets change their names multiple times to reflect regime changes (for example, in the former East Germany), so that two people from different generations could be talking about the same street and not recognise they’re doing so. If Stalin Road did change its name, would people still call it that anyway, and would it have remained a point of connection for me and the person I met the other day?

This review barely scratches the surface of what you can find within this book. Other notable topics it covers include street numbering (in Belgium, they used to number houses in the order they were built!), vanity addresses, and renaming streets as a form of protest. The Address Book is truly fascinating and wide-ranging. Not only did I learn a huge amount, but it made me think a lot more about where addresses come from, how they’re used, and how they can generate conflict and controversy.

What do addresses mean to us? Why are they so important? How can having an address help people out of poverty and what happens when people disagree over street names?

This fascinating and socially conscious book by lawyer and academic, Deirdre Mask, was an eye-opening read. Ranging across global locations and different time periods, she looks at the history of addresses and how they affect everyone today. Urban planning, homelessness, religion and race are some of the main themes. The book is partly personal to the author as an African American woman, and also as an American having moved to London. She visits some of the places she writes about, meeting campaigners and academics, which keeps the content varied. Sometimes it does seem to jump about a little, but it's not too problematic. I did feel that the content edged into general history too often and although I understand it was necessary to place the issues in context, some of it was treading familiar ground.

I'd recommend this book if you're interested in how racial identity in particular is linked to the concept of street addresses.

Thank you to Profile Books for the advance copy via NetGalley. The book will be published on April 2nd.

NB. This review will be published on my blog on March 28th.

A fascinating look at a subject I have never really thought about - addresses and their effect on our lives.
I would probably have enjoyed a slightly more British centred view, as I was expecting to read more about the classic British street names and their history. However, this book was much more global and made me consider many things i have never thought about before. I learned about the American grid system, the importance of giving slum-dwellers addresses so they can access government services, and difficulties faced by the homeless. A really interesting book that spurred me to go and find out more about many different areas of history and politics.

An intriguing topic, and a book which throws up so many interesting ideas! I really enjoyed reading this. It was, at times, a little difficult to follow the jumps around the world(sometimes in mid-chapter), but overall completely fascinating.

What is the significance of the Bobby Sands burger bar in Iran, the many Gropecunt Streets in medieval England and the location app what3words?
This book is about the politics of street names. They tell us the history of a place but also about who has power and who is marginalised.
How do you hold power in the world if you don’t have address? You can’t open a bank account, bd found in a medical emergency, get married.
The author takes us from Kolkata to Tokyo and London to South Africa to find out how innovators are getting around the problem of not having an address and why addresses matter.
I found it fascinating. Addresses tell us about what we want to remember as a society and who we want to commemorate but also how times change (and addresses with them).
This is a dense tome but definitely recommended reading for anyone who enjoys social history and a world view on an often overlooked issue.

This was an unusual book
It started with a very interesting look at what an address is and why it is important. I was expecting to hear more about the “mapping the unaddressed” project & the positives that have resulted from it but it seemed to drift away from this subject & the book goes on to explore a number of other aspects of addresses - it looks at how addresses reflect culture and politics – Roads named after controversial people, the New York practice of paying significant sums for the “right address” (even if it doesn’t quite make sense - eg an address of 55 Times Square may actually be down a side street!)
The book has a number of fascinating historical sections but does get a little “waffley” in places & seemed to jump around a bit.

Yes, as in a whole book about addresses, part of that non-fiction genre which answers questions you didn't know you had about something which, at least if you live in the urban West, you've probably taken for granted as beneath the threshold of notice. But being from Profile/Serpent's Tail, not a publisher known for Christmas cash-ins (and indeed, it's not out until April), it takes a far more political angle than many such. We open in rural West Virginia, where most people don't have addresses and plenty would like to keep it that way, retaining a deep backwoods suspicion of the government in all its forms, even if the current set-up means people dying because paramedics can't follow idiosyncratic directions down confusing lanes. Amusingly, some chapters later in Vienna, one of the birthplaces of house numbers (like lightbulbs, they seemed to spring up all over around the same time), an expert on the subject tells the author they're right. Yes, there are house number experts, or one, at least – Anton Tantner, whose book House Numbers makes Mask's theme seem shamelessly broad by comparison. "House numbers, he tells his readers, were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two tasks admirably. Instead they were designed to find you, tax you, imprison you, protect you. Rather than helping you find your way, house numbers help the government find you." That's a few chapters on, though. First we jump from the American countryside to Tottenham, and a street I myself boggled at when I first passed it back in my North London days, where Mask briefly considered buying a house which had a lot in its favour; still, you can see why an African American writer might have opted not to live on Black Boy Lane.

Elsewhere, Mask visits the slums of Kolkata, where a new project is intending to give even the most makeshift dwellings addresses – albeit, she notes, on a different system to the city proper; imperfect improvements to a system broken on so many levels are a running theme in the book. In the meantime, it's dispiriting if hardly surprising that a home-grown, democratically elected communist government should have been just as ready to dismiss the slum-dwellers as the Raj ever was, concerned that giving them addresses would mean admitting they were there in the first place. Not that the city will be unique in having parallel systems, which turn out to be surprisingly common, albeit along various different axes: Czech houses have a number for government and another for directional use; in Florence, residential and business purposes have different numbers. And plenty of other ways have been found to make a mess of the whole business, not least when money gets involved. In NYC, addresses can be changed for $11,000 – peanuts in property developer terms. But even one of the city's most famous addresses, Times Square, turns out to have been a vanity renaming to match London's 'Arsenal' station (GILLESPIE ROAD WILL RISE AGAIN!). Nor is the issue unique to Manhattan; in Chicago, a woman named Nancy Clay died because firefighters hadn't realised that the building One Illinois Place wasn't actually situated on Illinois Place. Something horribly Grenfell about that death by property prices, which makes one take a real glee in one London project Mask finds, a solution to the problem whereby homeless people almost have as many problems following from not having an address as they do from not having a home. Now, the proposal runs, they can be given dummy addresses of unoccupied properties, which will forward to post offices or the like. And what's one of the biggest batches of unoccupied properties? The ones the wealthy have bought purely as investments and then left empty. Sure, it would be better to actually let the cold and hungry live in them, but in the meantime, nicking their coveted postcodes would be a wonderful start.

To the British reader, some stories may be familiar, such as that of postal reformer Rowland Hill. It's poignant to be reminded, having seen how well the idea of state-funded broadband went down, that the penny post was also "a measure many thought would bankrupt the nation", and which instead proved a huge money-spinner. But as with John Snow and his ghost map, Mask uses old stories to make newer points; in Snow's case, as a contrast with this decade's cholera outbreak in Haiti where, unlike in Snow's Soho, there were determined efforts at obfuscating the UN's responsibility. So a story usually produced to show how knowledge saves lives is flipped - and, as she points out, while Snow may have ended one local epidemic, the wholesale eradication of cholera as a feature of London life came with the great sewer-building works...which were largely about getting rid of 'miasma'. A less grave example: most of my smutty-minded compatriots will know about Gropecunt Lane, but here its appearance serves to set up a hilarious though apparently sincere passage of charming American innocence over the campaign to rename a street in the West Midlands town of Rowley Regis: "I thought it sounded elegant – the light trill of the word Bell paired with the serious and solid End."

I suppose the story of William Penn, Philadelphia and the birth of the US grid system may well be as familiar to Americans as Hill, Snow and Bell End are to us, but it was new to me. And I'm fairly sure no Briton could have written with such equanimity about the various streets around the world named for Bobby Sands – although, perhaps helped by her husband coming from Cookstown, Mask addresses the Troubles* with considerably more nuance than most American writers manage. Elsewhere she offers an intriguing investigation into whether linguistics affects addressing conventions, with reference to Japanese and Korean, albeit one which ends on a wonderfully bathetic note, and takes us to South Africa's Constitutional Court, where the judges don't split along the left-right lines of the US supreme court, or even racial ones - except when it comes to renaming streets. An area in which Mandela erred on the side of caution ("a tactic to make the revolution seem less revolutionary"), but his successor Mbeki veered the other way. Some of these were names including racial slurs, or commemorating Afrikaaner heroes, where one can entirely see his point - but then you get to Mangosuthu Highway, named for an Inkatha Freedom Party leader, where switching that to ANC activist Griffiths Mxenge is nothing nobler than party favouritism. These complex, imperfect situations recur over and over, right through to the conclusion, where Mask talks about the way projects such as what3words usefully offer addresses for the previously unaddressable, while also noting that as the product of for-profit tech firms, the potential implications are troubling. Along the way we look at whether Romans had addresses, and if not how they managed, and encounter the concept of 'imageability', or more widely memorability, which explains why Boston and Florence are easier to navigate than Jersey City. It's a book of which I've been dropping snippets into conversations since I started reading it, and which I'd be buying at least one person for Christmas if only it weren't for that aforementioned release date issue. Ah well, maybe next year, if only we aren't all living amidst the rubble by then.

*I suppose that's yet another 20th century franchise due for an unwanted reboot soon.