Are you ready for some nonfiction?

Home and Away
When Said Hyder Akbar’s father returned to his native Afghanistan after Sept. 11 as a regional governor, Hyder asked to accompany him, to observe — and possibly to help. “Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager’s Story” (Bloomsbury, $25) is Hyder’s memoir of the three summers he spent with his father in Afghanistan. 

It’s a captivating read: well-written, touching and funny by turns, deeply personal and historically relevant.  As an Americanized teenager with Afghan roots, Hyder can put both Afghan politics and American coverage of them in perspective. He witnesses significant events (“I feel like I’m living through the Federalist Papers”), but personalizes his story with anecdotes — buying tickets at an airport snack bar, or his American stomach’s reaction to Afghan cuisine. He serves as a translator for a detained prisoner at the American base, but can also crack wise about his beloved uncle Rauf Mama’s glass eye.

Hyder recorded his experiences an audio journal for NPR, and he and his co-author, NPR editor Susan Burton, have put together a deftly written book — but it’s Hyder’s eye for detail that powers it, and when he’s talking about family friends, or interviewing an old man about a notorious massacre, he opens a window into a faraway culture.    —Sarah D. Bunting

Clothes off your back
From time to time, someone writes a book about herself that desperately needed to be written by someone else entirely. Alison Houtte’s “Alligators, Old Mink and New Money: One Woman’s Adventures in Vintage Clothing” (William Morrow; $24) is such a book. Houtte got writing help from her sister Melissa, but her self-congratulatory tone destroys the narrative.

The story of Houtte’s life as a young model in Paris who later opened a vintage clothing store in Brooklyn has interesting moments, particularly surrounding her widely questioned move to Flatbush Avenue. But it eventually becomes embarrassing reading story after story where the ending is always the same: Houtte does something wonderful, perfect, or brilliant. If she goes to a fancy party, someone famous will tell her how amazing she looks. If someone doubts a decision of hers, she will be proved absolutely right.

Unfortunately, while the world of vintage clothing is potentially a lot of fun to explore, the book is dull. Real clotheshorses may enjoy it, but aside from a few anecdotes about people who shop at her store — the ones that are not ultimately stories about how much those people all adore her — Houtte doesn’t make a very appealing narrator for her own story.    —Linda Holmes

Dropping a ‘Smartbomb’
If you thought Mario, The Sims, and the demons from “Doom” were colorful characters, you should see the geeks behind their digital code. As portrayed in “Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Global Videogame Industry” (Algonquin, $25), pioneers of the videogame industry are geniuses, poseurs and hustlers — nerds and outcasts who suddenly find themselves in an exploding industry that outgrosses annual movie ticket sales.

Algonquin

Married journalists Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby take the reader inside the gaming world with brief glimpses of its supercomputer origins, but most of the action takes place on tradeshow floors and hotel reception halls over the last five years. While the writing can sparkle (a virtual character in an online game has, “the posture of a young Rudolph Nureyev”), veteran game players will roll their eyes at the book's many simplistic overexplanations.

Rather than tackling the entire history of video games, the authors fashion, with impressive access, mini-profiles of some of the most creative minds in gaming, whether they’re launching Microsoft’s Xbox console or helping create the military’s “America’s Army” recruitment game. “Smartbomb” fuses together the heartbreak and growing pains of a fantasyland dealing with the realities of money and power.    —Omar L. Gallaga

World of wine, revisited
Wine freaks have long been familiar with Ralph Steadman’s previous ode to the vine, “The Grapes of Ralph,” and now the infamously acerbic illustrator of Hunter S. Thompson’s works has compiled a follow-up.

“Untrodden Grapes” (Harcourt, $35) covers similar ground: Steadman explores wine regions from Gascony to South Africa, again turning his pastime into an avocation (funded, in large part, by his label-drawing work for vintners and a British wine merchant) as he extols each locale’s virtues in a mix of Beat prose and his signature style of angular drawings.

His descriptions are even more subjective this time, to the point they occasionally can be disjointed.  Some items are lucid and brilliant, like his ode to Alsace, which is as riveting as his section on German wine in the earlier book. Other topics — like his travels through California —are meandering, if poetic. Of dinner with Bonny Doon winemaker Randall Grahm, Steadman mysteriously writes: “He sidesteps and you find yourself playing Ludo with Ho Chi Minh and wine is about revolution and guerrilla warfare in Leeds.”

Of course, the book is intended for casual browsing after one (or many) glasses of wine, so the hippie tone sort of works. Certainly, it’ll resonate among Steadman’s admirable fan base.  While not quite as solid an effort as “Grapes of Ralph,” it’s still thoughtfully written and visually dazzling — a wine treatise with almost none of the pretense, and all of the passion. That makes it worth its weight in Sauternes.    —Jon Bonné

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor. Jon Bonné is MSNBC.com's Lifestyle Editor. Sarah D. Bunting is a writer in Brooklyn. Omar Gallaga is a writer in Austin, Texas. Linda Holmes is a writer in Bloomington, Minn.

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