Audiobook reviews: 'Born a Crime,' 'Hidden Figures' and 'The Girl in Green'

Trevor Noah, comedian and host of "The Daily Show," reads his own engaging, substantive account of growing up in Johannesburg under apartheid and the years following.

Noah is the son of a Xhosa mother and a Swiss father — both of whom could have been imprisoned for the crime of interracial sexual relations. A social misfit, Noah made his way out of poverty and some danger through entrepreneurial ingenuity, comic genius and an ability to speak a number of tribal languages, which he gives marvelous voice to here.

Above all, Noah owes his success to the unfailing support of his mother, the real hero of the book. Forging her own small independence against all odds, she insisted that Noah learn English, and she sacrificed her small wages for his education: "She was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom would exist."

Noah combines personal stories with political and historical observations, bringing his own acute judgment, sardonic humor and sense of the absurd to bear on both. The author's gift for vocal impersonation elevates the audio version into something even more splendid than an already terrific memoir.

Margot Lee Shetterly's "Hidden Figures" — the book behind the award-winning movie — focuses on the lives of five black female mathematicians who worked in a segregated division of the Langley Research Center in Virginia.

Performing myriad calculations for aeronautical research at NACA (later NASA), they all played important, invisible roles in U.S. air and space flight. Most monumentally, one of them, Katherine Goble Johnson, was key in calculating the trajectories for John Glenn's orbital spaceflight.

The astronaut trusted her over machines, saying, "I want this human computer to check the output of the electronic computer, and if she says they're good, I'm good to go."

Derek B. Miller's second novel begins in 1991 in Iraq near the Kuwait border, and, although the Gulf War has officially ended, the killing has not.

Among the dead is a Shiite girl in a green dress, shot by an Iraqi officer in front of British journalist Thomas Benton and U.S. Army Pvt. Arwood Hobbes.

More than two decades later, Benton gets a call from Hobbes claiming to have just seen the same girl in a video of a recent mortar attack in Kurdistan.

The two men set off to rescue this impossible figure, and from that improbable beginning comes a terrifically suspenseful and darkly satiric tale of people caught in the ever mutating conflicts of the Middle East.

Will Damron's general narration is kindly and calm in deadpan juxtaposition to the scenes of madness he describes. He gives the novel's multinational cast suitable accents and dispositions ranging through British, Southern/U.S.military, Swedish and Iraqi/Syrian/Kurdish.