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.
Staff Picks
Book, movie, and music picks from MI staff.
New Non-fiction
Careless people : a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism
By Wynn-Williams, Sarah, author.
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."--
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 timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself je
We tell ourselves stories : Joan Didion and the American dream machine
By Wilkinson, Alissa, author.