You may think you've never heard of retired army major Jeffrey McGowan before, but you have. On February 27, 2004, he wound up in the New York Times when New Paltz Mayor Jason West married him to his partner, Billiam van Roestenberg, in the first same-sex wedding in New York State. Not bad for a guy who spent most of his life in the closet.

McGowan also spent a good chunk of his life—from 1988 to 1998—in the army, and that's the subject of his first book, Major Conflict: One Man's Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military. Its title accumulates meanings as you read. As a kid growing up in Queens, McGowan played war games so fanatically that the nuns in school had to remind him he wasn't a Stuka dive-bomber. As a young adult, he began to play head games with himself. Maybe he looked forward to holding hands with his male friend when nobody was watching, but what he really wanted, he told himself, was a military career, a wife, and children.

As a major in the army, McGowan found that his career and his sexuality collided head on. It was easier at first, during Bush the elder's administration, when McGowan's concern was keeping his men alive in the Persian Gulf. It became harder during Clinton's presidency, when the attempt to make the military more hospitable for gays and lesbians unwittingly had the opposite effect.

McGowan writes his memoir as you'd imagine a soldier might. Not especially subtle or poetic, his prose marches in a straight line and keeps the pages turning. But the last chapters of Major Conflict are downright compelling, as he writes about the casualties of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, real men whose stories are tragic and too common.

The big tragedy, of course, is McGowan's. "Becoming a soldier," he writes, "seemed as necessary to me as fulfilling the most basic of needs." In the end, he found he couldn't reconcile what he did with who he was. He says he's happier than ever now, and working as a pharmaceutical sales representative. Still, you can't help but mourn for the little boy who pretended to be a dive-bomber.

Jeffrey McGowan will read from Major Conflict at Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz on Saturday, March 12 at 7pm.

His tics and jerky movements started in infancy, but Lowell Handler didn't get a name or diagnosis for them until age 21. Tourette's Syndrome can cause a wide variety of involuntary actions—twitching, odd vocalizations, expletive screaming—especially at inappropriate times. Twitch and Shout is an insider's look at the uninhibited life of Touretters, and at the way the world looks back at them as well.

Handler's a first-class tour guide. A photo-journalist by trade (and photography instructor at Dutchess Community College), he's exposed the world of the Touretter in projects like a collaboration with eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks for Life magazine, and the production and narration of an Emmy-nominated documentary, also called Twitch and Shout.

The book is a window into life with Tourette's in both content and style; its pace alternately surges, slows, and explodes. Through Handler's photographs and his intense, unsparing prose, we meet Touretters of every degree; the 11-year-old twins who jerk and jump in unison, a closeted lesbian who compulsively repeats the word "gay," an orchestra conductor who's spasm-free when she lifts her baton.

There's even another photojournalist/Touretter—a Frenchman without Handler's compulsion to explain the condition. A waitress once asked the two of them if they were all right as they "kicked and barked" their way through lunch. "We are high on crack!" the Frenchman gleefully replied.

Getting a name for Handler's differences provided both a relief and a burden; it explained his problems, but also removed hope they'd ever get fixed or just go away. Life with TS is one without the grace of self-editing; a hand flies out, unbidden sounds and words erupt. But as with many neurobiological conditions, brilliance emerges through the cracks. Dr. Samuel Johnson, creator of the first English language dictionary, probably had Tourette's. Oliver Sacks believes Mozart did too. Ancient Zulus revered Touretters, and usually made them chieftains or healers. "Don't feel strange," Handler's father told him upon his diagnosis, "This is the future. People like you are vehicles to get us across into the next stage."

Touretters' most debilitating impairment is the way the rest of us often perceive them. And maybe that's the thing that needs fixing.

Lowell Handler will read from Twitch and Shout at Barnes and Noble in Kingston on Wednesday, March 23 at 7pm.

Samantha Lieffer is a free spirit who teaches pre-kindergarten and works in the box office of an off-Broadway theatre. Although not lacking in drama, her life has been blessedly free of blood and gore. She has a phobia of cops, a bisexual philandering ex-husband, and a mother named Sydney who's made a fortune in self-help writing, while leaving her own daughter perplexed about the nature of their relationship.

Woodstock author Alison Gaylin presents an enormous incongruity right up front: artsy, gentle Samantha has killed someone. And with classic New York Art World insanity, she even has a co-worker shallow enough to envy her the experience. ("I'd kill for publicity like yours.") To say the reader's curiosity is engaged would be serious understatement.

It's a twisty-turny tale indeed. Samantha, a believer in signs and omens, and an ardent student of human nature—her own and others'—witnesses something so odd she just can't get it out of her mind. But getting anyone else to pay attention is an uphill schlep. Little weirdnesses begin to pile up, but it's hard to convince other people to take them seriously: when someone at a gay bar slips a note into Samantha's bag saying Hide, her best friend argues that it was a concerned member of the Fashion Gestapo trying to point out to her that her bag's a disgrace.

Something's going on here, Samantha is sure—but what? Is it about sadomasochism? Satanism? Mirrored contact lenses, things that nobody should do to a Barbie doll, and strange phone calls all draw Samantha and the reader inexorably toward the reality of the situation: she may well be a little crazy, but someone is most definitely out to get her.

Samantha is great company, sharp and funny with a heart of gold. Finding herself at the heart of these curious matters, she steps up and finds unexpected courage—and love in the arms of a homicide detective. Even her lunatic co-workers at the off-Broadway box office have developed toward recognizable humanity by story's end. And that's all I am going to tell you about story's end—except that the criminal mind behind the mayhem turns out to be as surprising a villain as the semi-slacker, head-in-the-clouds Samantha is an action heroine.

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder.

I should know; I was an EHM."

So begins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins' memoir cum mea culpa about his service as a consigliore in what he calls the "corporatocracy"—the monolithic fusion of corporations, banks, and governments (mainly the US) that preach the gospel "that all economic growth benefits humankind and the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits." Perkins, former chief economist at the international consulting firm of Charles T. Main (MAIN), frankly has a lot to confess, and his book echoes Christian works like St. Augustine's Confessions in its narrative arc from spiritual debasement to awakening.

Perkins' work as an EHM took him on a tour of the developing world in the 1970s and early 80s, where he persuaded countries that were strategically important to the US—Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Panama—to accept humungous loans for infrastructure development. These projects were then contracted out to US corporations. Saddled with debts they could not hope to repay, these countries came under the influence of US-dominated agencies like the World Bank. If a country would not accept these terms, then the "jackals" would be sent in, according to Perkins, and presidents and prime ministers would die in mysterious crashes (Torrijos in Panama, Roldos in Ecuador), or democratically elected governments would be subverted (Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala). If that didn't work, invasion was the final step (Noriega in Panama).

While Perkins' prose is downright simplistic at times—chapter titles include "I Quit" and "I Take a Bribe"—and he has a tendency to gloss over specific economic details in favor of a broad storytelling sweep, in Confessions, Perkins has achieved a rare thing—he has pulled back the veil and shown us the inner, sinister, mechanics of the macroeconomic world.