Books
Historic Mechanics' Institute looks like a library, feels like a library with so much to offer with its fine collection and provoking programming. This gem is not to be missed. - Peter Wiley, Chairman Emeritus, John Wiley and Sons
Mechanics' Institute Library has over 100,000 circulating materials in its collection and continues to grow. We serve the general reader with a wide, diverse, and eclectic collection covering a vast array of subjects and interests.
See a selection of our collection below and visit our Catalog to explore even more.
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Staff Picks
Books, music, and movie recommendations from Mechanics' staff
Table for two : fictions
By Towles, Amor, author.
Books, music, and movie recommendations from Mechanics' staff
Wandering stars
By Orange, Tommy, 1982- author.
Books, music, and movie recommendations from Mechanics' staff
Unknown pleasures : inside Joy Division
By Hook, Peter, 1956- author.
Books, music, and movie recommendations from Mechanics' staff
Essays After Eighty
By Hall, Donald, 1928-2018, author.
Books, music, and movie recommendations from Mechanics' staff
The god of the woods
By Moore, Liz, 1983- author.
Books, music, and movie recommendations from Mechanics' staff
House of leaves
By Danielewski, Mark Z., author.
Books, music, and movie recommendations from Mechanics' staff
New Fiction
See more new fiction in our catalog
The emperor of gladness : a novel
By Vuong, Ocean, 1988- author.
"A year in the life of a wayward young man in New England who, by chance, becomes the caretaker for an eighty-two-year-old widow living with dementia, powering a story of friendship, loss, and how much we're willing to risk to claim one of life's most treasured mercies: a second chance"--
Murder takes a vacation : a novel
By Lippman, Laura, 1959- author.
"Highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman returns with an irresistible mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a former private investigator and middle-aged widow whose vacation on a Parisian river cruise turns into a deadly international mystery...that only she can solve"--
Atmosphere : a love story
By Reid, Taylor Jenkins, author.
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA's space shuttle program.
The Möbius book
By Lacey, Catherine, 1985- author.
Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith's absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and heartbreaking -- and heart-mending -- exploration of endings and beginnings. A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith's power, and inherent danger.
Bury our bones in the midnight soil
By Schwab, Victoria, author.
"From V. E. Schwab, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: a new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger. Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1532. London, 1827. Boston, 2019. Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots. One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild. And all of them grow teeth"--
Vera, or faith : a novel
By Shteyngart, Gary, 1972- author.
"The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world"--
Proof : a thriller
By Cowan, Jon, author.
"As a disgraced lawyer with a drinking problem that he doesn't view as a problem, Jake West is coasting on what's left of his charm and money. He used to be the kind of lawyer who could convince anyone of anything--until he decided to take on his father's biggest client and prove his dad was corrupt. Now Jake finds himself almost at rock bottom, and that's before his ex-best friend is murdered and Jake is accused of the crime. In a desperate bid to save himself, Jake must sober up and search for the real killer, whom he suspects might be hidden in one of the case files of his father's illustrious law firm. As he delves into a labyrinth of lies and corruption, Jake teams up with an eclectic group of equally broken people as they all must skirt the law in order to find the proof he needs . . . no matter the personal or professional cost"--
Food person : a novel
By Roberts, Adam D., author.
Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person.
The fact checker : a novel
By Kelley, Austin, 1973- author.
"An endearingly obsessive fact-checker stumbles around New York in search of truth, meaning, and a woman." -Kirkus
The crash
By McFadden, Freida, author.
There's no place like home... Blake Porter is riding high, until he's not.
The bright years : a novel
By Damoff, Sarah, author.
This multigenerational novel follows the Bright family across four gen
New Non-fiction
Everything is tuberculosis : the history and persistence of our deadliest infection
By Green, John, 1977- author.
When the going was good : an editor's adventures during the last golden age of magazines
By Carter, Graydon, author.
Empire of AI : dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
By Hao, Karen, author.
"From a brilliant longtime AI Insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy"--Dust jacket.
Nexus : a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI
By Harari, Yuval N., author
"For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI--a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence" --Provided by publisher.
On muscle : the stuff that moves us and why it matters
By Tsui, Bonnie, author.
"Cardiac, smooth, skeletal--these three different types of muscles in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty--and how they have distorted it--through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health."--
The lost orchid : a story of Victorian plunder and obsession
By Bilston, Sarah, author.
"Sarah Bilston follows the colorful characters and fateful dramas of orchid mania, the nineteenth-century craze among European and North American collectors vying to own the world's most coveted flowers. Focusing on the hunt for the so-called lost orchid, Bilston reveals the enormous human and environmental cost of a colonial obsession."--
Start here : instructions for becoming a better cook
By El-Waylly, Sohla, author.
"More than 150 recipes--and techniques--for cooking with creativity and confidence"--
Capitalism and its critics : a history : from the Industrial Revolution to AI
By Cassidy, John, 1963- author.
A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics. At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, inequality, trade wars, and a right-wing populist backlash to globalization are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system's critics. From the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, the absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names--Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi--but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; Thomas Carlyle, the conservative prophet of the moral depredations of the market; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of Keynes; and Samir Amin, the leftist French-Egyptian economist and analyst of globalization. Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics is true big history that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time. -- Provided by publisher.
Fake work : how I began to suspect capitalism is a joke
By La Berge, Leigh Claire, author.
"In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work-for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders. While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process-a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well tim