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DierdreMaskThe Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and PowerSt. Martin's Press, 2020. 336 p. $26.99

2020; Wiley; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/padr.12361

1728-4457

Landis MacKellar,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

It seems pinched to open this review with reference to that often cited, but seldom read, author Michel Foucault. Yet, some foundation for the relevance of this book—which has sent reviewers, including this one, scrambling to explain why they like it so much—to the journal's readership is necessary. Foucault was intellectually perceptive; if, as always, textually obtuse, in introducing the concept of biopower—the power of the state to control, through information, our bodies. For example, not of least interest, through enumeration. Now, Foucault and his acolytes are to power as was J. Edgar Hoover to Communism—they see it everywhere. But, nonetheless. We, those under power's biothumb, have not only age, sex (which has become rather complicated), marital status, labor force status, and other tags attached to us; we have something else, as well: a street address. Or, if you are in the majority of the world's population, none at all; a grave affront to power. No address means no possibility to open a bank account, register to vote, sign up for social insurance, etc. You are invisible; you do not exist; save, perhaps, as a roaming mobile threat. For most readers of this review, it is an annoying but comical Catch-22—try renting an apartment in Berlin without a German bank account; try opening a German bank account without a German address—that can be finessed by privilege, canniness, and charm. For others, it is not so simple and more consequential. Wanderers of all kinds—such as Travellers, Roma, Tuareg, and Bedouin, to name a few—have been regarded as a threat to authority, often persecuted or forcibly sedentarized (as in Central Asia under Stalin and Libya under Qaddafi). And, lack of a reliable address system cripples cadastre, the basis of any modern property rights regime, with the worst impact on women in the countries where they are disfavored by traditional law. There are at least half a dozen themes covered in the book, whose chapters are essentially feature articles aimed at the bourgeois-bohemian high-end journal outlet, meaning that the volume can be dipped into at will. One theme is the link between address and public health; specifically infectious disease. The story of John Snow and cholera mapping in London is related, as are related stories of infectious disease tracing in Haiti and Africa. Most readers of this journal would not be blown away, but this would make for excellent student reading. Not discussed, but obvious to anyone living the episode, is that the reasonably (so far) better Covid response of Europe relative to the United States owes something to the fact that, here, you must be legally registered at a current address, with civil penalties if you are not. That has simplified contact tracing. One chapter describes NGO efforts to use GPS technology to assign street addresses in order to bring Kolkata slumdwellers access to fundamental social rights, meagre though they be. So, too, are episodes of resistance to being pinned down, like a butterfly, on a high-resolution map. In Maria Theresa's Austria, addresses were a despised means of enforcing conscription. Here in Central Europe, currents run deep—Christians received Arabic numerical street numbers; Jews, whom she hated, Roman ones. In rural West Virginia of the 1960s, residents had George Jones’ pappy's fear of the revenue man (White Lightning, if you want to know the song). One chapter looks at mental maps and the neuroscience of human spatial perception. Another looks at how cities without addresses at all (antique Rome, for example), got along. Tokyo in the 1970s was not much better, This critic had an enlivened evening in that city when it is a miracle that he got back to his field headquarters. The author recounts a similar experience (presumably less enlivened, to grant her the margin of appreciation), in Africa. Many readers of this journal will have had the experience of professional travel to cities where, however, meticulous the written instructions from the desk clerk, the hotel driver requires multiple stops to seek directions. Much of the book is not about addresses per se as it is about street (and broader local geographic) names. Place names are perhaps more political than anything else, at any scale, even national. American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky stated with authority that any country with “Democratic” in its name is not. There is a debate, in the United States, over Confederate street names that is as polarized as that over Confederate monuments—and there are a lot more street names than there are statues. The author is even-handed; nowhere more so than in her treatment of Mississippi novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote (1916–2005), whose patrician defense of the Confederate heritage has been controversial. A minor dig at the author—referring to Foote's spoken English as “Tupelo Honey” serves neither the subject nor Van Morrison well. “Seductive” or “enchanting” is what she is trying to get at; she should come out and say so. In New York City, as described in the opening chapter—a strong one, too, the author knows her rhetorical sequencing—an astonishing proportion of City Council resolutions as judged by the ledger, sometimes bitterly disputed, concern assignment of superfluous geographical designations to appease one political pressure group or another—with much symbolic but little practical significance. The Population Council, publisher of this journal, is located at One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (after the Secretary-General of the United Nations shot down over today's Democratic Republic of the Congo in circumstances that remain mysterious), just a block down from Katherine Hepburn Place (she lived in the neighborhood). Ask a cop fifty meters away and he will look at you with bewilderment (2nd Avenue at 48th is what will get you there). The creation of New York City geographical fantasies honoring Russian dissidents under Mayor Edward Koch was brisk; just to insult the Russian government and shore up the Jewish vote. More recently, there was a wave of namings in honor of first responders who died in the 9/11 attacks. Back in the bad old NS-days, German street and place names referring to Jews were enthusiastically changed to honor Hitler; then after the war, place names linked to Nazis were changed again with equal dispatch, albeit with socialists complaining in one case that the Jew being commemorated was a capitalist leech. Current German geography, East and West, is sprinkled with tributes to anti-Nazi and Communist icons; some major (Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin) and some so minor as to belong in a footnote to a footnote. Sic transit gloria mundi, they used to say when crowning a pope. But, Lomé still has Avenue du Dr. Franz Josef Strauss, named after the legendary Bavarian Minister-President who once visited there (he exercises dominion over the Munich airport, as well). Fly into Tbilisi, and you will get to your hotel in the cold dawn along George W. Bush Avenue. And Teheran has Bobby Sands Road (formerly Winston Churchill Road; now, there is sic transit gloria for you). The process of how modern streets retain their traditional names receives a great deal of attention. Restricting myself to cities where I Iive, in Vienna, one of my physicians is located on Schlachthausgasse (Slaughterhouse Street), which should lead me to change doctors, but does not. In Paris, the famous Beat Hotel of Ginsburg, Gysin, Burroughs & Cie. in the 6th arrondissement, is located on rue Git le Couer, mysteriously evolved from the name of Gilles le Queux, a 13th century cook who exercised his craft there. My Middle French is limited, but I believe this refers to his pigtail. Shelley had a thing or two to say on ephemeral tributes in Ozymandias. True sedimentation is perhaps more likely to be found in the persistence of offensive historical street names that the locals have learned to live with or, perhaps, even favor for conversation-openers at cocktail hour. For example, in England and Wales, Black Boy Road (where the author considered a house) and Gropecunt Lane (which exists in multiple variants and locales, typically in proximity to the medieval market). John D. Loudermilk and the Nashville Teens gave us Tobacco Road (after the crop on which the residents relied); Steve Earle gave us Copperhead Road (after a poisonous snake), but only Middle French could bequeath us Gropecunt Lane. Back in West Virginia, where a crash address assignment program was implemented under time pressure, there are generations to come who may be consigned to live on Beer Can Road. The book is a romp through history and across the globe. The author puts on no academic airs—her mastery of the subject is so obvious that she does not have to. Erudition rarely comes over the PDR transom, but this book has it. While the apparatus is somewhat loose, it suffices and the author's credibility is unassailable. Most books this journal reviews showcase the authors’ intelligence, but few of those reviews state that the author is genuinely gifted. This one does. She may even be afflicted with genius.