I first encountered Mark Levin when our respective bosses, Drew Lewis (mine) and Ed Meese (Levin’s), were leading figures and friends in the Reagan era. Meese was counselor to the president and later attorney general, the conservative Reagan’s champion of conservatism; Lewis was the secretary of transportation who recommended Reagan fire the striking air-traffic controllers. The issue at hand was a minor one, a mid-level job in the Justice Department for an ex-Lewis aide. My task was simple: call Mark Levin, my counterpart, and see if Meese couldn’t help move the process along. The conversation that resulted was memorable. It turned out the ex-Lewis aide had been a Bush supporter in 1980. And while it was true that George H. W. Bush was now Ronald Reagan’s vice president, Levin took pains to instruct me on the importance of the conservative principles behind the Reagan Revolution.

Clearly, the job applicant didn’t understand them, or he would never have been caught dead supporting Bush. So, as sweetly as possible, Levin told me that Ed Meese would not be pushing a candidate who was less than devoted to conservative principles for even a mid-level job in the Reagan Justice Department.

Levin never actually used the phrase “Get off the phone, you big dope”—the line he has now made famous in his role as a star of the conservative talk radio firmament. But I found myself laughing after I hung up, sensing that in some form that was exactly the essence of the message just politely delivered.

Levin has now taken the time to put those principles into book form. It is an irony in light of the considerable success he has begun to enjoy with his ABC-syndicated talk radio show that his less public work as an attorney (the longtime president of the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation, he was also the attorney general’s chief of staff at Justice) is overshadowed by celebrity. Yet it is his first-rate legal mind, combined with an astute political sense, that has launched his veritable Renaissance-style career as lawyer, radio star, and writer.

Read the rest of the review.