New York, like other great cities, boasts numerous memorials and monuments. One of a city’s many functions is to serve as a repository of collective memory. We honor the people and deeds that went into our making, or that express the better angels of our nature. Of course one man’s better angels are another man’s demons. In the age of political correctness, memorialization is a fraught business indeed.

A few years ago, a group proposed an Audrey Flack statue of Catherine of Braganza for Queens, the borough named for Charles’s consort. Charges that she was a slaveholder, however, stopped that project dead in its tracks. Our city has three statues of George Washington — John Quincy Adams Ward’s on the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial, Henry Merwin Shrady’s equestrian statue in Continental Army Plaza in Williamsburg, and Henry Kirke Brown’s equestrian statue in Union Square — that rank as masterpieces, yet one wonders if any of them could be erected today.

Instead, our present-day memorials traffic in ambiguity and literalism — think of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, D.C., or Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial, in Battery Park City. Many New Yorkers have just plain forgotten who the people or what the deeds were that are being memorialized.

And yet our world was made by great people and deeds — men and women who were not perfect, and deeds that were not unambiguously good for all. But does that mean we should jettison the project of collective memorialization? Fortunately, Dianne Durante does not think so, and her new book, “Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide” (New York University Press, 300 pages, $18.95), is a primer on getting to know our city’s monuments.

“Outdoor Monuments” is not a comprehensive or even a very thorough guidebook. “The Art Commission and the Municipal Art Society Guide to Manhattan’s Outdoor Sculpture,” published in 1988 by Michele Cohen and Margot Gayle contains 216 more entries. Why then should one own both books? Ms. Durante’s entries are much longer than those of the previous book. More important, each entry has a uniform structure. It contains a photo, vital stats (year dedicated, size, materials), an “About the Sculpture” section, and an “About the Subject” section, as well as a carefully chosen boxed quotation culled from an old book or newspaper that pertains to the subject.

For example, the entry on the William Cullen Bryant Memorial in Bryant Park includes Bryant’s fine poem “My Autumn Walk” (1864) and some sprightly lines about Bryant’s monumental career as editor and poet: “Some consider Bryant long-winded; but then, some consider Bill Clinton eloquent. Depends on your style preferences and your breath control.” Lines like that recur throughout and leaven a book that at first blush appears dauntingly didactic. In addition to the entries, the book includes “Appendix A: How to Read a Sculpture,” in which Ms. Durante outlines how we might analyze a given monument: “Pose: If you came home to find your Significant Other waiting for you in this pose (arms crossed, chest thrust out) how do you think he or she was feeling?” Her tips aren’t bad, and may be helpful to some readers — though the hows and whys of looking at sculpture are likelier to impress the reader in the monument entries themselves.

The book’s lone defect is that Ms. Durante gives short shrift to the sculptors. The entry on the Bryant Memorial simply fails to mention the sculptor Herbert Adams (save for the mention in the vital stats section). We get no sense of the importance of, say, Jules-Félix Coutan, who designed the Glory of Commerce atop Grand Central Terminal, and thus may be less likely to view his works in Paris or Buenos Aires. Another minor cavil is that by concentrating on Manhattan, Ms. Durante ignores many of the city’s best public artworks, such as the Shrady equestrian statue.

“Outdoor Monuments” is well written, well researched, well thought-out, funny, and often refreshingly original, and will help any interested New Yorker know about the wondrous monuments that dot the city.

fmorrone@nysun.com