Judging a book’s cover

The MIT Press boasted that this was the second straight year that its designer Emily Gutheinz made the list. This time it was for a book called “Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space,” by Charlie Hailey, an assistant professor at the University of Florida’s School of Architecture. The book has a raw-looking cover that resembles, at a glance, cardboard or pressboard. The cover text is spare, as is the illustration - a glimpse of elegant leafless tree branches.

Nonlocal standouts include “Le Corbusier: A Life,” by Nicholas Fox and published by Knopf, whose blocks of bold primary colors surrounding a black-and-white photograph of the architect effectively evoke midcentury modernism, and “Wishful Drinking,” a memoir by Carrie Fisher. It’s hard to resist the illustration of a possibly passed-out Princess Leia, holding a martini glass, with pills at her side.

He had an astonishing recent success with “A Glorious Dawn” (1.3 million YouTube views), featuring cosmic imagery, Boswell’s ambient music, and the Auto-Tuned voice of Carl Sagan (with a guest appearance by Stephen Hawking) marveling once again over the intricacies of physics and nature.

“The sky calls to us,” Sagan “sings.” “If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.”

Yeah, it doesn’t work at all in summary, but the video itself is eerily effective at capturing the sense of wonder the late Sagan brought to the subject. Boswell has just released a somewhat less sublime follow-up, “We Are All Connected,” featuring Sagan as well as the late physicist Richard Feynman, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye (the “Science Guy”). Carrie Brownstein, of NPR’s Monitor Mix, describes something that will occur to younger viewers immediately as they take it in: “Bill Nye’s enthusiastic gesticulating - coupled with the camera angle - perfectly emulates certain hip-hop stylings.”

A Russian armored-car builder, Dartz, has announced a four-ton, four-wheel-drive armored vehicle that can withstand a grenade-launcher attack yet does not sacrifice luxury in the pursuit of security. The truck’s bullet-proof windows are gold-plated, according to the company’s promotional materials, its exhaust pipes fashioned of tungsten, the gauges encrusted with diamonds and other jewels.

In the pièce de resistance (or something), the seats of the Prombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition will be covered with “whale-penis leather” - the same ultra-rare material, Dartz hastens to add, that adorned the bar stools in the Christina O, a yacht owned by the late Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis. (Buyers especially aroused by that feature may be in for a disappointment. In response to an e-mailed query, a Dartz spokesman said the company was “under great pressure” from animal rights groups to forgo the special seat covers, after Dartz started publicizing them, and was considering a change in plans.)

The company is scheduled to introduce the $1.6 million vehicle at a luxury-auto show in Monaco next April called Top Marques, it says. No word on whether it is headed for the US market, or on gas mileage, but buyers will get three bottles of ultra-expensive vodka, gratis, Dartz promises.

Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com.