A number of Apple applications have debug menus. In these menus are advanced options, or options used for troubleshooting that don’t need to be presented to users in everyday use of the tools. Address Book has such a menu. To see it, write a boolean ABShowDebugMenu key into the com.apple.addressbook defaults domain as true:
defaults write com.apple.addressbook ABShowDebugMenu -bool YES
Once run, a number of new features will be available, allowing you to, amongst other things, browse an Address Book Archive, open Time Machine from within the Address Book application (allowing you to restore specific contacts), export detailed database information and disable global searching. 
This still isn’t the kind of information you’d get with dmesg or something like that, but it’s worth checking out when you’re having issues with Address Book. To get rid of the debug menu:
defaults write com.apple.addressbook ABShowDebugMenu -bool NO
