The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 149
7,238 public-domain books, summarised. Page 149 of 151.
The Water-Babies
Charles Kingsley
A neglected child tumbles out of a life of soot and blows into a realm of clear water and fierce fairies, where the only way to grow up is to learn to clean himself inside and out.
Tom Brown at Oxford
Thomas Hughes
An energetic boy trades rugby fields for Oxford quadrangles, discovering that growing into a man requires far more than winning races and picking fights.
A Treatise on Physiology and Hygiene: For Educational Institutions and General Readers
Joseph C. (Joseph Chrisman) Hutchison
A structured, accessible manual demystifies the mechanics of the human body, transforming complex anatomical science into everyday practical wisdom for the home and classroom.
At home with the Patagonians
George C. Musters
A year-long journey alongside the Tehuelche people reveals an immense, unmapped interior where surviving requires extraordinary skill, swift horses, and deep mutual trust.
Authors and Friends
Annie Fields
An intimate, unvarnished look at the private lives and quiet genius of New England’s classic literary circle.
Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters
George Fitzhugh
Every system of free market capitalism secretly feeds upon its own working class, exploiting the vulnerable under a thin veneer of personal liberty.
Copyright Basics
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Ownership over creative expression does not begin in a courtroom or government office, but at the exact moment a line of text, a melody, or a drawing is fixed in tangible form.
Elements of Morals: With Special Application of the Moral Law to the Duties of the Individual and of Society and the State
Paul Janet
A structured account of human duty grounded in natural reason, Paul Janet’s standard textbook charts a methodical course through individual conduct, social obligations, and the institutional foundations of the state.
Materials and Methods of Fiction: With an Introduction by Brander Matthews
Clayton Meeker Hamilton
An inquiry into the foundational mechanics of narrative, this treatise dissects how storytellers transform actualities into lasting human truths. It offers a precise roadmap for analyzing plot, character, and setting across verse and prose.
Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education
Charles H. (Charles Henry) Ham
A radical proposal for educational reform, this nineteenth-century treatise argues that coupling manual tool-work with traditional academic study is essential for building intellect, moral character, and a truly equitable modern democracy.
The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark
Eva Emery Dye
A sweeping march across the American continent, where frontier warfare, high diplomacy, and the raw grit of wilderness survival collide to shape a young nation's destiny.
The Figure in the Carpet
Henry James
A young literary critic learns from a famous author that a hidden pattern governs all his published novels, sparking a lifelong, destructive obsession with discovering the secret.
The Flying Saucers are Real
Donald E. (Donald Edward) Keyhoe
Military aviation officers and commercial pilots keep sighting massive, high-speed metallic disks, forcing a former Marine Corps pilot to investigate whether the United States government is covering up visits from extraterrestrial space craft.
The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume 10
Various
At the dawn of modern psychiatry, investigators grapple with the hidden mechanics of dreams, bodily symptoms, and unconscious conflicts, probing where physical illness ends and mental disturbance begins.
The Lilac Fairy Book
Andrew Lang
A clever monkey tricks a scheming shark, a foolish youth hunts a wolf, and a magic thread destroys a bride’s fine gown in a rich tapestry of international folklore.
The New World of Islam
Lothrop Stoddard
Across the Near and Middle East, a massive religious and political awakening is quietly dismantling centuries of decay and redrawing the global balance of power.
The World's Greatest Books
Unknown
A vast library of classic fiction opens its doors, offering a guided journey through the moral crossroads, tragic downfalls, and quiet triumphs that shaped nineteenth-century storytelling.
Tolerance
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Humanity marches through a dark valley of fear, building intellectual prisons only to shatter them and begin the struggle anew.
Bird Houses Boys Can Build
Albert Frederick Siepert
A modest manual keg post becomes a sanctuary, bridging human craftsmanship with wild life. Simple wood, clear plans, and thoughtful care invite nature back into built landscapes.
Birds and Poets
John Burroughs
A deep love for the open air meets a rigorous critical mind, proving that listening closely to a bird’s song is not so different from reading a great poet.
Complete Hypnotism, Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism: How to Hypnotize: Being an Exhaustive and Practical System of Method, Application, and Use
A. Alpheus
A century-old practical guide to the mysterious boundaries of the human mind, this book separates genuine psychological manipulation from theatrical illusion, offering a structured journey through hypnotic trances, mental influence, and spiritualist deception.
Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven
Mark Twain
A dead sea captain races a comet through the cosmos, misses his destination, and discovers that the conventional human picture of the afterlife is completely wrong.
Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series
Jacob Abbott
A steppe chieftain’s son rises through factional warfare to unite the Mongol tribes and forge an empire of unprecedented scale.
Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A brilliant mind wages a lifelong battle against illness, financial anxiety, and its own restless brilliance across the landscape of nineteenth-century Europe.
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
Martin Robison Delany
A bold nineteenth-century treatise rejects domestic subordination and outlines a self-determined path toward black political independence and global migration.
The Gray Angels
Nalbro Bartley
A penniless country girl with a soaring voice trades her small-town engagement for a grand-opera career, only to discover that fame without love is an empty triumph.
The Mayflower and Her Log; July 15, 1620-May 6, 1621
Azel Ames
Against heavy sea, conspiracy, and crippling winter, a small ship sets out for a new world. This rigorous historical account reveals the true logistics, political intrigue, and human costs behind the voyage that reshaped America.
The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia
Theophilus G. (Theophilus Goldridge) Pinches
An essential reference for readers seeking to understand the ancient Near Eastern context of biblical literature, this masterwork brings cuneiform tablets and monumental inscriptions into direct conversation with the Old Testament.
The Squatter and the Don: A Novel Descriptive of Contemporary Occurrences in California
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
When a defeated Californio family tries to protect its ancestral land, an American squatter and his idealistic son force a confrontation between legal displacement and romantic duty.
Verses 1889-1896
Rudyard Kipling
A sweeping poetic chronicle captures the grit of British imperial soldiery, northern border feuds, and open ocean voyages across the Victorian globe.
Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, Vol. III
Unknown
In a twilight world of political collapse and private longing, the minor verse of seventeenth-century England registers every quiet tremor of a kingdom unraveling.
Religion and the rise of capitalism
R. H. (Richard Henry) Tawney
A sweeping historical study traces how Christian social thought transformed from medieval corporate ethics into the relentless individualism of modern commercial capitalism.
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XIV, South Carolina Narratives, Part 1
United States. Work Projects Administration
An unvarnished oral history preserves the firsthand voices of formerly enslaved South Carolinians, capturing their daily survival, family bonds, and life after emancipation.
Terrestrial and Celestial Globes Volume 1: Their History and Construction Including a Consideration of their Value as Aids in the Study of Geography and Astronomy
Edward Luther Stevenson
Long before humans mapped the entire Earth or peered into the outer reaches of the night sky, visionary thinkers attempted to wrap both heaven and earth in hand-held spheres.
The Buddhist Catechism
Henry Steel Olcott
A structured, question-and-answer synthesis presents core Buddhist tenets as a coherent, rational system, bridging ancient scriptural teachings with modern scientific thought.
The Motor Routes of France: To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone Valley
Gordon Home
A grand circular drive across early twentieth-century France offers sweeping roads, centuries of bloody history, and the vibrant, dusty realities of early motoring.
The pillow-book of Sei Shōnagon
Sei Shōnagon
Behind the serene, silk-curtained walls of tenth-century Heian Japan, a quick-witted court lady records the delicate aesthetic, sharp social rivalries, and quiet moments that define her world.
Wanderings in Spain
Théophile Gautier
A landscape of severe beauty unfolds beneath a sun so fierce that even the shade burns.
How Girls Can Help Their Country
Baden-Powell of Gilwell, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, Baron
Building character, practical resourcefulness, and civic obligation, this historical handbook outlines a comprehensive code of living for young women. It transforms outdoor survival, home economics, and physical fitness into essential duties for the modern, self-reliant citizen.
Lafcadio Hearn
Nina H. Kennard
A restless wanderer seeking aesthetic beauty across continents finds his ultimate anchor in the ghostly lore and quiet traditions of old Japan.
Montreal, 1535-1914. Vol. 1. Under the French Régime, 1535-1760
William H. (William Henry) Atherton
Amid river mists and forest shadows, a frail outpost on the St. Lawrence grows into a fortified bastion, where religious idealism, imperial greed, and frontier warfare collision-course to remake a continent.
Our First Half-Century: A Review of Queensland Progress Based Upon Official Information
Queensland
Fifty years of pioneer grit, political maneuvering, and raw economic ambition transformed a remote Australian territory into a thriving modern state.
Our Southern Highlanders
Horace Kephart
Deep in the Southern Appalachians, an isolated people live by frontier customs, ancient dialects, and wild laws long forgotten by the rest of the nation.
Scotland's Mark on America
George Fraser Black
Driven by religious conviction, economic necessity, and an untamed spirit of independence, Scottish immigrants crossed the Atlantic to systematically shape the civic, industrial, and cultural bedrock of the emerging American republic.
Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America: Two Hundred and Fifty Tunes and Texts, with an Introduction and Notes
Unknown
Centuries of sacred folk melodies, long preserved in rural Southern songbooks and communal singing schools, find their meticulous chronicler in George Pullen Jackson's foundational recovery of early American spiritual music.
The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages
Charles Reade
A single moment of youthful tenderness in the Netherlands splits a young artist from his betrothed, setting off a sprawling journey across a brutal, beautiful fifteenth-century Europe where religious fanaticism and passionate love collide.
The Ghost World
T. F. (Thomas Firminger) Thiselton-Dyer
Boundaries blur between the living and the departed across cultures, revealing how human fears, hopes, and memories shape phantom lore across centuries.
The Ingoldsby Legends
Thomas Ingoldsby
Spun out of Kentish folklore, monastic history, and pure comic audacity, this expansive miscellany of verse and prose bound together by Thomas Ingoldsby glides effortlessly between ghastly apparitions and absurd high jinks.