[The Day They Came to Arrest the Book is an] undisguised but timely and articulate issue book with a number of artfully developed stereotypes…. New librarian Dierdre Fitzgerald finds herself smack in the middle of [a censorship] controversy when a student, objecting to Twain's portrayal of blacks and his use of the word "nigger" in [Huckleberry Finn] …, complains to his father, who petitions the principal (the most odious character in the book) for the novel's withdrawal from classroom use and from the high school library. Using a number of staged debates, among them a volatile book-review-committee meeting, Hentoff makes his own views clear while he presents principal arguments involved in book censorship and a crystalline statement of the freedoms at stake. He closes with a chilling little scenario that points to the false sense of security that comes from winning one battle while the war rages on. A...