Books like The Address Book — picked by fans

This book takes something so in-your-face yet so often ignored about New York and other 21st-century global metropolises—their polyglot nature—and makes it the focus. I know when I arrive in a major city, the cacophony of myriad languages stands out on that first subway, bus, and tram ride. But soon enough, it all becomes background noise.

By foregrounding this phenomenon, arguing that it’s peaking today as global migration swells, and telling the stories of several tenacious language communities in New York’s outer boroughs, Perlin reads NYC through the alphabets that cover its bodega awnings.

This book looks at flâneurie, the Gilded Age gentlemen’s pastime of walking through a city purely for curiosity’s sake, through women’s eyes. Of course, a man has opportunities to walk through a city unnoticed and unimpeded in a way that a woman does not.

Walking with Elkin through cities I know well helped me realize how much I take for granted as a man (significant helpings of anonymity and safety) and the particular joys of liberation cities have offered women past, present, and future.

I’ve read more books than I care to remember that treat cities solely as markets, using an economic lens that reduces urbanites to mere maximizers of their own economic self-interest. This book does the opposite, and that’s why I found it so refreshing.

Urban observer and activist Jeremiah Moss chronicles New York City during the pandemic, a time when there’s literally nothing to buy—no stores to shop in, no restaurants to eat in, and no fashion trends to keep up with. With the market shut down, Moss finds that neighbors reconnect with neighbors on a human level, and a creative, festival-like atmosphere sweeps the city. This book helped me remember what’s great about living in a big city despite the many obvious cost-of-living drawbacks.

I love this book because it was so ahead of its time. Written during San Francisco’s first bout of hyper-gentrification—the 1990s dot-com boom—it is a chronicle of and tribute to the economically marginal but culturally central communities that got squeezed out: SRO denizens, Black activists, and queer refugees from Middle America.

In this 2001 book, a yet-to-be-discovered Solnit, in league with photographers Susan Schwartzenberg and Kate Joyce, records it all through the bulldozed and whitewashed spaces where these urbanites once lived. Most indelible is Joyce’s photo essay on San Francisco Starbucks outlets, each with a line below marking the storefront’s former life (“New Manila Restaurant, 1964-1994”; “Melody Video & Sound, 1936-1992”) showing how a flood of corporate money washed away so much that was unique in a great American city.

London’s British Museum, with its massive and diverse collections, is world famous and the story of its foundation and early years in the eighteenth century sheds light on the histories of collecting, knowledge, and exploration. More than twenty essays were assembled to celebrate the opening of the Enlightenment Gallery in the King’s Library after years of research and refurbishment. These essays draw readers into the people, the objects, and the ideas that shaped this important and influential institution. The book is lavishly illustrated with gorgeous photographs of paintings and statues, coins, fossils, china, and much more—a wonderful way to grasp the museum’s stupendous holdings and also to understand better the controversies it has engendered.

The Enlightenment is often associated with intellectual changes. But the book sheds a new light on this “Age of Reason” by showing how emotions and feelings played a crucial role in this intellectually and sensorially dynamic period. Purnell tells this change by providing many interesting, and funny, episodes. My favorite, among others, is the seventeenth-century vogue for perfumes made of the excretions of the civet cat or the musk deer, and it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that floral scents became popular. This shift had to do with people’s ideas about health, cleanliness, and naturalness that changed over time. You will learn how and why people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought about the senses, how they experience their sensory world, and how our sensory experience came about over the course of a few hundred years.

The philosopher and polemicist Sala-Molins fired a bow shot across Enlightenment scholarship with this book in 1992. In an era when most French scholars of the Enlightenment continued to study (and valorize) the figureheads of the era, Sala-Molins attributed the supposed silence of the philosophes regarding the horrors of chattel slavery to deep-seated racism. More polemically he called out individual thinkers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, the latter of whom Sala-Molins memorably called a négrier or slave trader. Peu importe or little does it matter that the book itself is rife with historical inaccuracies. The Dark Side of the Light was and is a powerful cri de coeur directed at scholars of the eighteenth century, a plea for them to look more carefully at the legacies – good and bad – that we now associate with the Enlightenment. 

The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is one of those characters that you loathe, but cannot help but find fascinating. By all standards, this deviant aristocrat was a gentleman in name only. Yet his remarkable life (32 years of it spent in prison) and amoral philosophizing provide the grist for a great biography under the pen of Gray. Readers will find many of de Sade’s horrific exploits here, yet this book also explores his relationship with the two most important women in his life: his beloved wife, who indulged him for decades, and his hated mother-in-law, whom he envisioned flaying alive before throwing her “into a vat of vinegar.” To a large degree, Marquis’s life and philosophy were an intentionally extreme version of the Enlightenment’s emancipation of the individual. A great window into the dark side of the Enlightenment.

This book is not as acclaimed as the others on this list, but it is a hidden gem. Staloff deftly weaves together the lives and ideas of three of the most notable founders, and the ways in which they were influenced by their Enlightenment forebears. Precisely because the book is relatively little-known, I recommend it all the time to colleagues and students.

I read this book in college, and it is perhaps the book that got me interested in gothic literature. It has everything a gothic novel should have: a haunted castle, a damsel in distress, and mystery. And I love all three of these elements. There is also a misguided King who creates havoc.

Like the books above, I have read this one more than once.