Maverick: A Life in Politics.

Through most of Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.'s 30-year public career, from his days in the United States Senate during Watergate to his tumultuous four years as governor of Connecticut, he marched to a tune only he could hear. Opponents who heard music of their own were likely to be lambasted as tone-deaf, or just not smart enough to hear the bells that rang so loudly for Weicker.

In a world of political spinelessness, Weicker's contrariness made him charming, while the equal measure of self-righteousness that fueled it made him a huge pain in the neck.

His new book of political reminiscence, Maverick: A Life in Politics, captures that mixture of traits perfectly, which is to say that it is by turns inspiring and utterly annoying. At its core, it is a scrapbook of Weicker's favorite fights over the years, with his role during Watergate as the Republican party's bete noire and chief Nixon administration inquisitor taking center stage. The underlying theme, and perhaps its most contrary note of all, is that politics is a good and noble calling, and the process of bargaining and deal-making is not sordid or shameful but simply how it afl works.

Maverick is not a prescription for a new program to save America, as some people might have expected, given Weicker's recent musings about running for president. Although he pronounces the death of the two-party system and predicts multiple credible candidates for high office in the future, the closest he comes to outlining an agenda is near the end when he says that whoever is elected must have the guts to really balance the federal budget and not simply dance around it. Skim a few chapters, and you'd know who has more guts than anyone: Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.

"On occasion," he writes, "as when colleagues said they would not vote and speak out as I did for fear of a backlash, I did sometimes see myself as a maverick. Independent, unafraid, an oddity."

Yet his book is also in part a manual for how to make going it alone pay great dividends. Watergate, which broke the careers and lives of so many, was Weicker's deliverance. His high-profile role on the televised committee hearings, starring as the brave young Republican from Connecticut charging full-tilt against members of his own party, alienated Republicans in his home state but won over many Democrats and independents - the very coalition he used to stay in the Senate for 18 years and win the governor's office in 1990. "I wasn't hurt by Watergate," he writes. "I was made by it."

Given the ponderousness of many political memoirs, Weicker's breezy if self-absorbed tone can be refreshing at times, and his penchant for salty language and the settling of old scores is malicious fun. No recent Republican president comes off unravaged save Gerald Ford, who Weicker believes was one of the best presidents in recent years,. And I challenge you to find any recent high-minded political tome in which the author confesses, after an encounter with his foes, "I was pissed."

Still, this reader sometimes wished for a little less about how mad Weicker got, or who praised him, and a little more reflection on his times, and what they taught us, or him, about the world. For all the detail on how the Nixon administration fell, Weicker rarely allows much of a glimpse of what really drives him.

He tells us, for example, he came to Washington as the congressman from Connecticut's fourth district in 1968 ready to support some of the most conservative causes on the Republican agenda, such as school prayer. By the early seventies, during his first term in the Senate, however, he seems to have emerged fully formed as a socially liberal protege of the late Jacob K. Javits. The evolution of his thinking, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam era, is a story I very much would have liked to have read.

Like the man himself, however, Weicker's book simply comes as it is, take it or leave it. If you can get past the pompous chapter titles like "Saving the Oceans," and "Protecting the Constitution," you're likely to find enough nuggets to keep you going, and perhaps in the end make you wish that there were a few more like him out there, blowing their own horns in full, discordant exuberance.

Kirk Johnson, a reporter for The New York Times, covered the Weicker administration in Hartford.