American librarians have been fighting Attorney General John Ashcroft and his attacks on readers’ privacy. But “for book lovers, Ashcroft versus the librarians is some thing else – one of those spectacles that manage, like book bannings in suburban schools or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to glamorize reading and make it seem to be, as it sometimes and in some places actually is, a high-stakes activity. Suddenly, your unprepossessing branch library – a low-slung 60’s building, perhaps, and not in the greatest repair – looms as an epic battleground of ideas.”