Anyone who had just sat through the "Christmas Sweater" show, though, might have identified better with the man's original impulse. But in the theater where I watched the program, on the top floor of a high-end shopping mall near the D.C.-Maryland border, there weren't that many viewers to see it all go down. Beck simulcast his little pageant from a packed house in lower Manhattan, but 15 minutes before showtime in D.C., there were only 10 people in the audience with me. The crowd didn't grow much by the end of the night, either. The theater told me they sold fewer than 30 tickets, at $20 a pop. (That turned out to be the rule rather than the exception, according to anecdotal reports of small crowds all over.)

The show got started with some weird, spacey music, as if Beck was trying to prepare his audience for an alien invasion. Then the host took the stage (accompanied by a mostly black choir singing Christmas carols). Signs for Napa Auto Parts, the program's sponsor, hung incongruously in the wings, visible whenever the camera shot Beck from the side. "Two years ago, I wrote a book called 'The Christmas Sweater' because I knew that a storm was coming," he said. What inspired him to write the novel was a memory of his own storm. One Christmas, back before he became a Mormon and got sober, Beck found himself drunk, depressed and too broke to shop for his kids' presents anywhere but at CVS. "I felt like a loser," he said, tears welling up in his eyes.

Those tears would turn out to be the leitmotif of the night, especially once the replay of last year's show got going. Acting, à la Glenn Beck, apparently consists mostly of choking up -- with sadness, with rage, with fright, with anything. The staging of his performance didn't help, either. Wearing a microphone taped to his head and at least three T-shirts (all of which he wound up sweating through by the end of the show), Beck stood in front of six video monitors, which flashed images and colors to help suggest scenes. An orchestra played along from the side of the stage. Beck played every character in the show -- from Eddie, the little boy who's clearly supposed to be Beck, to his mother and grandparents, to Russell, the story's Jesus figure. (Because what good is a Christmas story without a Jesus figure?)

The plot goes like this. Eddie's father has died, which we learned, in the stage version, through a hokey series of voice-overs, and his mom is struggling to pay the bills and raise Eddie. Though Eddie has his heart set on a shiny, red bike with a black leather banana seat for Christmas, his mom can't afford it, and she knits him a sweater instead. He freaks out and throws it on the floor of his room, saying it's itchy and he doesn't like it. They go visit Eddie's grandparents, and Eddie sulks the whole night. Instead of staying over on their farm, he makes Mom drive him back home through the snow. He falls asleep in the car. So does Mom! They crash, she dies, he goes to live with Grandma and Grandpa.

Then things start to lose the narrative thread a little bit. Feeling sorry for himself -- understandably, you'd think, since he's now a 12-year-old orphan -- Eddie lashes out at his grandparents, too. His life's been spiraling out of control; first his dad died of cancer, then his mom died in a wreck, and to top it all off, he never got the bike he wanted! So it's no wonder he starts hanging out next door, at an apparently abandoned farmhouse where he meets the mysterious Russell (whom Beck played with an exaggerated farmhand voice that he'd rip a liberal for using to mock hardworking Americans). Russell tells Eddie he has only himself to blame for his problems. So he gets back to sulking. Eventually, Eddie discovers that he was going to get that bike on the night his mom died, but his grandfather had hidden it to give to him the next day; when Eddie demanded to go home, he missed his chance to get it. He winds up taking it from the barn and fleeing the farm. Then he gets lost in a cornfield, the bike breaks down, and a massive metaphor -- er, storm -- blows up the road. Suddenly Russell appears out of nowhere, telling him he's got to weather the storm if he wants to get home. "Eddie, don't fear the storm," Russell says. "Fear the cornfield, don't fear the storm." Wise words, indeed. With more tears, some prayers and some repentance, Eddie survives the storm. Russell shows him around a heavenly meadow, and tells him his parents are there watching over him. Then Russell starts glowing white, and tells Eddie, "You are joy, Eddie! You are joy!" before turning into pure light. Eddie collapses, then wakes up ... back home at his grandparents' farm -- with Mom there! His sorrow has given him a second chance to go back and stop being such an ungrateful brat about the sweater. And everyone lives happily ever after.

For what's supposed to be an inspiration, the story is pretty dark. (Dark enough, in fact, that the children's version of the book, which came out this fall, ditches just about every part of the tale except that Eddie wanted a bike and got a sweater instead.) Some of it is based on his own life -- his mother did die when he was a teenager, though his father didn't, and he grew up relatively poor, like Eddie in the story. Beck's "acting" didn't help lighten the mood much; when he wasn't sobbing, he was practically screaming with resentment, turning lines that only needed a hint of sarcasm into sneers of outrage. At the climactic moment when the storm passes over Eddie, Beck collapsed into a fetal ball on the stage, crying into his hands, while a woman sang a hymn. The handful of people in the theater with me laughed at a few of his corny jokes, but mostly they sat there, silent and impassive, as the show dragged on for more than 90 minutes.

But as hokey and melodramatic as the staging of the novel was, the special added feature for this year's performance was worse. First, we watched Beck start to cry all over again, just remembering how sad it was for him to do the show the year before. Then, Beck's producers sent out four people who personified the themes of the book: a woman whose daughter had died in a car crash; a junkie, whose family rescued him from drugged-out despair; a woman who survived breast cancer in part because someone gave her a copy of Beck's novel during her chemotherapy; and the would-be suicide, who chose life because of Beck's dulcet voice on the radio.

"There is a storm in each of us," Beck said. "A storm is coming. We're all beginning to see it form."

That line woke me from the semi-stupor the show had put me in, because it was the first thing Beck had said all night that bore any resemblance to the deranged, paranoid conspiracy theorist on Fox News. Call Beck crazy, call him dangerous, but when he talks politics, no one could ever call him boring. When he's telling Christmas stories full of pathos and melodrama, though, he's excruciatingly dull. The strange voices weren't enough to overcome the overwrought narrative or the heavy-handed morals in the tale. There wasn't enough of the weirdness, the mania that drives Beck when he talks about how ACORN or SEIU are out to steal the country, or how all of President Obama's advisors are Maoist thugs. Even Beck's crying -- an over-the-top bit of preposterousness on the TV show -- got stale.

By the time Beck finished showing little videos introducing his guests, featuring epigrams from the novel that made clear how their story related to his, there wasn't much time to talk to them. He got them all to agree that life is very hard, and we all have storms to pass through. "I want a T-shirt that says, 'I survived 2009,'" he said.

And then he started talking about Tiger Woods, of all things. "He's a pretty good golfer, man, he's the best anybody has ever been at that," he said. "That's his job -- to play golf. And he's got half a billion dollars for playing golf. He's got a yacht, he's got multiple houses. He's -- well, he had a car, that's a fixer-upper at this point. He married a Swedish supermodel. And somehow or another, he was still empty inside." Tiger's story, apparently, was just another piece of Beck's. "Find out how to fill that emptiness, and it ain't with stuff," Beck said. "You can either be a victim, or a victor."

The choir sang us out of the theater, a little dazed, two and a quarter hours after the show had started. The few other people in the audience had loved it. "It was a great spiritual message, you know? Inspirational," said Barry Taylor, a professional magician -- yes, really -- from Rockville, Md., who watches Beck on TV and decided to come see the show after hearing him promote it endlessly for the last few weeks. "I've got a lot of shows coming up -- I'll be infused with just a positive energy."

It didn't take long for the theater to empty out. Beck is rerunning the whole thing again in a week, but the employees at the cinema seemed glad to get back to the usual fare in Theater One -- "The Twilight Saga: New Moon." Maybe next year, Beck can add a few vampires to the program. Sweaters alone, it seems, aren't quite enough to draw a crowd.

If I am giving Palin's book a thumbs up, it is qualified by the fact that, let's face it, the genre of the female political autobiography is itself in its infancy. It's like some 53rd state, housing at this moment in time only a handful of crude, wooden, lean-to outposts. These are times when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright can do a book tour based on her pins and brooches, about which "Morning Edition's" Susan Stamberg will huskily midwife a most empathic and unironic discussion. These are times when Nancy Pelosi comes out with a memoir slender as a Hallmark card, a memoir no living person but me has apparently read, vaguely titled "Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters," which her publishers carefully deemed ("How shall we describe this?") a "keepsake." Then again, one understands why female political books tend toward focus group-approved mottos and tasteful brooches -- women have not been in politics for very long and, even more than the men in this rabid age, if they dare utter an opinion or take a stand, they and, weirdly, also their children get media-raped and shredded. (One curious triangulation in Palin's book is irritation with Obama's and Biden's relatively easy media rides coupled with unexpected sympathy for media-slogfested Hillary Clinton. Our bodies, ourselves! "Clinton-Palin in 2012!" Can you imagine? Neither can I.)

So what's refreshing is that Palin seems unafraid to express herself, warts and all -- informal campaign motto: "Heels on! Gloves off!" -- and the book just goes where it goes. Much has already been made of her freewheeling critiques, not just of Democrats but also of Republican Party insiders and McCain 2008 campaign managers, particularly in the gloomy waning days of the run. ("Schmidt leveled his eyes at me. 'We don't have the money Obama does and the numbers don't look good. We've got to change things up.' I AGREE. I was eager to hear a new strategy. 'So,' he continued, 'headquarters is flying in a nutritionist.'" Ba-dump-bump!) She is forthcoming enough about her personal failings. Belying her shellacked outer shell, more reminiscent to me of Anita Bryant than Tina Fey, Palin confesses a not-ready-for-prime-time horror at Trig's Down syndrome diagnosis and relates at least one fairly satisfying campaign trail fight with husband Todd. As opposed to Bush's post-Yale reinvention of himself as a Texas cowboy, Palin doesn't seem to be making this folksy stuff up. And really, who would want to? While courting Palin as a teen, Todd gave her "gold nugget earrings"; with only one phone line in the house, she and Todd yapped at night on their back porches on fishing boat radios, until they realized every commercial trucker trundling through town could hear them; the wedding rings were each $35, the post-nuptial dinner was at Wendy's. All this in the town of Wasilla, which, due to stratospheric sales of this particular product, Wal-Mart has deemed "the Duct Tape capital of the world."

In Palin's "Little House on the Tundra" (her own coinage), the very state of Alaska seems to have its own sound, its own language, its own quaint patois. There are so many more colorful sayings than that "pit bull with lipstick" quip! Things grow "faster than fireweed in July"; bench warming during sports games is known as "riding the pine." Alaskan history itself seems to be rich, so very rich in ... the letter K. "The year before Jack London arrived, Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Charlie met up in the Yukon Territory east of the Alaska border with a gold miner who had been panning near the Klondike River," reads one particularly chunky sentence. Decades later, that same territory might be crossed by a winning Iditarod dog team, whose members had endearing names like Hobo, Lippy and Fudge! There is the truly startling tale of their neighbor Doc. A private bush pilot, he was electrocuted and fell off a ladder while hand-draping fluorescent flagging over power lines so he could more safely land his Citabria at home. Never one to give up, after the accident Doc "retrained himself to be a left-handed, one-armed dentist"! Writes Palin of her huntin' dad (who is known for palming balmy, just-removed moose eyeballs and warming fish eggs in his mouth), "So a lot of what Alaskans ate, we raised or hunted: moose, caribou, ptarmigan, and ducks. Dad and his friends became their own small-game taxidermists. Even today, my parents' living room looks like a natural history museum. And when an earthquake hits, Dad can tell the magnitude by how fast the tail wags on the stuffed cougar." As Frontier literature, I believe "Going Rogue" compares favorably to the Natty Bumpo stories of James Fenimore Cooper. And who wants to argue with me?

Indeed, by the end of this book, I thought, Never mind the hundreds of thousands of reasons the fiery Republican femme fatale is hated in, for instance, my oh-so-blue state of California. Honestly, a fair amount of what makes Sarah Palin weird is the very same stuff that makes Alaska weird. Covering one-fifth of continental North America (as Palin points out), Alaska is baffling. Alaska is ungraspable. Recall Jon Krakauer's descriptions of Alaska in "Into the Wild." On the one hand, a Palin quip about her favorite natural "organic protein" seems calculated to inflame PETA: "I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals -- right next to the mashed potatoes."

On the other hand, in Alaska it appears people really do eat what they hunt. They hunt in Alaska, they do: Wind chill drops to minus 60, there's no main thruway to Juneau, wolves are predators, they kill moose and caribou, so hunters shoot them, half are Native Americans, people get their heads lopped off in snowmobile accidents, oil spills destroy fisheries, thousands of jobs depend on natural pipelines, stuffed cougar tails shake in giant earthquakes, there are halibut tacos, God knows.

So when Palin writes: "The spirit of Alaska is unique, combining awe for the untamed majesty of nature, a rugged individualism, and strong traditions of mutual aid," what can you do but shrug and grudgingly concur? Sarah Palin is Alaska. She is Alaskan. (I almost bouncily want to write "AlasCan!") As for the next chapter, look for new brooches, at least in 2012. 

On Wednesday, though, McCain gave an interview to Reuters in which he stepped up to defend the men and women who'd worked for him who are now being slammed by Palin.

"There's been a lot of dust flying around in the last few days and I just wanted to mention that I have the highest regard for Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace and the rest of the team, McCain said. "I appreciated all the hard work and everything they did to help the campaign .... I think it's just time to move on."

Wallace in particular has been a favorite scapegoat for Palin and her supporters, and Schmidt got perhaps the harshest treatment of anyone in "Going Rogue."

McCain did have nice things to say about Palin. "I'm still really proud of her and the campaign she ran and I think it's pretty obvious that she has a substantial base and interest out there," McCain told Reuters.

Do you want to read it? Of course not. So we've compiled the key elements to the book so you can know what everyone's talking about without enduring 413 pages of Palin-isms -- or shelling out $30 for a book.

So ... what, exactly, is the book about? 

Agenda No. 1, apparently: Settle old scores

The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani wrote that Palin spends much of the book lashing out at the McCain campaign -- for being too slow in addressing the economic collapse, too easy on its rival, and too disorganized -- and laying principal blame for its failures on Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief campaign strategist and one of the people responsible for choosing Palin as a running mate. She largely blames the McCain staff for all the miscues of 2008, but rather than granular details of policy disagreements or communication problems, she's not above the cheap shot.

At one point, Palin recounts (via Politico), Schmidt told her to get a nutritionist. "As he lectured, I looked at his rotund physique and noted that he used nicotine to keep his own cognitive connections humming along."

On the loyalty of Nicolle Wallace, McCain spokesperson and former Bush official: "I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had. But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn't have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general."

Wallace also is painted as a hoity-toity Beltway mean girl. According to Politico, she writes about Wallace snobbishly going through her wardrobe in Palin's Alaskan bedroom. "No ... no ... no [Wallace] said as she slid each garment aside on its hangar." The clothes, Wallace claimed, were not appropriate for a vice-presidential nominee -- and it was Wallace, according to the book, who made the decision to purchase those costly, controversial designer clothes for the Palins.

Then, cleverly, Palin uses Wallace to smear CBS's Katie Couric (whose devastating interview with Palin created a damaging media narrative). According to Palin: "'[Couric] just has such low self-esteem,' Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. 'She just feels she can't trust anybody.'"

Agenda 2: Bolster her folksy image

Palin also uses the book to paint herself as a woman of the people, whose ignorance about world affairs is no impediment to her ambitions (because "there's no better training ground for politics than motherhood"). She later argues that her family-budgeting skills and belief in creationism made her into a "much needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington D.C."

According to the Washington Post, Palin goes to considerable length to assert her religious faith. On the campaign trail, she writes, she even took a call from controversial Pastor Rick Warren while in the shower: "I would never turn down prayer even with limited hours in a campaign day, standing in a few inches of water with a shower curtain for a wardrobe. You do what you've got to do."

Also,  the Los Angeles Times notes that, unlike many other celebrity memoirists, Palin doesn't acknowledge her "collaborator" until late in her acknowledgments (after five HarperCollins editors and before "everyone who values good customer service").

Agenda 3: Lay the groundwork for . . .

The NYT's Kakutani believes the the book is a "calculated attempt to position -- for 2012." Other politicos and talking heads seem to agree. Will it work? Only time will tell.

But if she does enter political life again, the book has a litany of blurbs and bloopers she'll have to live down. Many media outlets have combed through the book to extract some of its most noteworthy or bizarre passages. Among the best that have popped up:

• On the phone call from McCain, when he offered her a place on his ticket: "For some reason, when the call came at the State Fair, it didn't come as a huge shock ... I certainly didn't think, Well, of course this would happen. But neither did I think, What an astonishing idea." (via MSNBC)
• On the irresistible sex appeal of Todd Palin: "That day in sunny Texas when the divorce rumors were rampant in the tabloids, I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house so Trig could nap while I made calls. Seeing Todd's blue eyes smiling, I chuckled. Dang, I thought. Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?" (via First Post)
• On doing an "SNL" sketch with Alec Baldwin: "The bigwigs haggled back and forth over my appearance with Alec, the writers sending down some lines where Alec was basically supposed to perform a comic dissection on me. Then I was supposed to passively take his arm and stroll offstage. From a political messaging standpoint, the campaign could see that wasn't going to work. We put our heads together and sent the producers a counteroffer: Alec would still get his barbs in, then I would say, 'Hey, Baldwin, weren't you supposed to leave the country after the last election?' Uh ... no, producers said." (Via First Post)

But perhaps the book's bigger buzz has been its inaccuracies. The Associated Press published a thorough summary of them (a project that Palin dismissed on her Facebook page as "opposition research," claiming that reporters would be better off fact-checking "Pelosi's health care takeover costs"). Among the AP's finds:

• Palin claims to have asked to stay "only" in reasonably priced rooms while on Alaska state business (AP: She once took a $3,000 trip to New York, and billed Alaska $20,000 for children's travel).
• She claims to have financed her campaign for governor on small donations (AP: About half of her campaign money came from people and political action committees giving over $500).
• She describes Alaska as a state that doesn't want "help" from government (AP: Alaska is one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies).

Elsewhere: 

• Media Matters disproved Palin's claim (among others) that she did not support aerial hunting. (In fact, in 2007, she introduced a bill to "simplify and clarify" the state's "'same day airborne hunting' law.")
• At the Huffington Post, Sam Stein disproved Palin's claim that she was always excited about the prospect of going on "Saturday Night Live" (leaked McCain campaign e-mails show that she initially had some strong reservations).

And, as the book enters wider circulation, we're sure there will be more. Let us know in the Comments section if you come across a great blooper we've missed.