Perhaps the coolest part of my job is getting embargoed copies of best sellers and getting to read them well in advance of release.Around Christmas this year, I received a small package in the mail and out came Ameritopia with a great big sticker on the front. “Pre-Publication Copy. EMBARGOED until January 16, 2012.” Well, the problem was that it was Christmas time and I had no time to sit down and read a book. I put it on my desk and there it sat.As luck would have it, I fell under the weather and started traveling all about the same time. In and out of airports, in and out of the doctor’s office, in and out of bed — I had a little down time and I picked it up and started reading.Let me first say that the cool thing about reading a Mark Levin book or an Ann Coulter book is that if you are in a crowded place you occasionally notice people who notice what you are reading getting up and moving away from you and others moving closer — the books alone are crowd control items and have also served to get me off jury duty.As for the contents of the book? Fantastic. And I don’t just say that because Mark is a friend.

Regular listeners of my radio show know I constantly refer back to to Men in Black when legal issues arise on the show. Mark has a unique ability to take complex subjects and boil them down to their essentials, which he then conveys in an accessible, easy to understand manner.This time is no different.Mark’s subject is left wing utopia versus what America is actually. It’s a breakdown of the typical view of what a utopia is and is not and what America is. Mark succinctly explains how the evolution of the concept of a utopia has built the intellectual framework for statism, how it does not work, and how the American founders broke with that intellectual framework with new ideas from the enlightenment to pursue a nation where the state did not control man’s destiny into a utopian fantasy, but rather, as Lincoln said, let each man make himself.Over time, of course, we know how the story goes. The checks and balances broke down, the constitution “evolved” under liberal jurisprudence, and the state has grown not just in budgetary size, but creeping more and more into our lives and personal decision making processes.Part 2 of Mark’s book should be read by every high school student. It is a great breakdown of the ideas that influenced our founders and how they applied them. From Locke to Montesquieu, Mark takes what could be difficult concepts and makes them so even a public school grad can understand them.I really, really enjoyed the book and fully suspect you will too. Yet again, Mark Levin has another best seller. In all honesty, I have told Rush Limbaugh several times it is time for him to write another book. But, and no offense Rush if you read this, Mark has filled the void ably and, unlike a lot of talk radio hosts in America, fills that void with intellectual fire power, not pablum and crap.