Michèle Valerie Cloonan. The Monumental Challenge of Preservation: The Past in a Volatile World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018. 280p. Hardcover, $30.00 (ISBN: 978-0-262-03773-0).

In her book The Monumental Challenge of Preservation , author Michele Valerie Cloonan addresses a wide array of issues, as diverse as they are immense. It’s not just library and information preservation engaging this professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences at Simmons College. Rather, as her subtitle, The Past in a Volatile World , suggests, her scope is broader, and her focus is the preservation of world culture itself, in all its manifestations.