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All free summaries — page 150
47,382 public-domain books, summarised. Page 150 of 988.

Giordano Bruno
J. Lewis (James Lewis) McIntyre
A restless sixteenth-century friar breaks his vows, wanders across Europe, and constructs a daring cosmic philosophy that eventually leads him straight into the flames of the Inquisition.

Hyperion
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A grieving scholar wanderlusts across Germany and Switzerland, seeking solace in old stories, long walks, and bright conversation before discovering that the only true cure for loss is turning forward to life.

Orley Farm
Anthony Trollope
When a devoted mother commits a secret crime to secure her infant son’s inheritance, she spends twenty years quietly enduring the terror of discovery, only to watch her sacrifice tear apart the gentle world she fought so hard to join.

Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II
Plutarch
An inquiry into human nature, divine justice, and the cosmos unfolds through lively philosophical dialogues that bridge historical action with metaphysical speculation.

Teutonic Mythology: Gods and Goddesses of the Northland, Vol. 3
Viktor Rydberg
A vast mythic architecture links ancient northern songs, heroic journeys, and cosmic catastrophe into a single unified saga. Across subterranean rivers and frost-bound peaks, divine champions and fallen artisans shape the destiny of gods and men.

The Cryptogram: A Novel
James De Mille
A deathbed promise binds an aristocratic youth and an heiress into a sudden marriage, setting off a sprawling, continent-spanning drama of stolen identities, coded papers, and dark family secrets. <Image alt="Ruins of an ancient castle along a river bank surrounded by lush greenery" caption="An ancient English…

The Koran (Al-Qur'an)
J. M. (John Medows) Rodwell
A single voice calls out from a world of dust and devotion, demanding absolute surrender to an unseen Lord.

The Old East Indiamen
E. Keble (Edward Keble) Chatterton
Driven by commercial ambition and naval daring, armed merchant vessels forged Britain’s trade network across distant seas, enduring storms, mutinies, and wartime battles to shape a global empire.

Under the Window: Pictures & Rhymes for Children
Kate Greenaway
Children wander through sunlit gardens, chase hoops, and whisper secrets over garden fences, capturing the fleeting, quiet enchantment of early childhood.

A Selection of Cases on the Law of Torts
Unknown
Legal duties do not spring from abstract sentiment, but from the hard boundaries of proximity, common sense, and statutory obligation. This foundational collection maps the evolving doctrines of civil wrongs across American and English jurisprudence, tracing how courts balance individual liberty against the…

Carnacki, the Ghost Finder
William Hope Hodgson
A detective of the unseen defends the living from terrifying hauntings using ancient magic and modern tools.

Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician
Frederick Niecks
A lonely child who played for emperors grew into an elusive master, transmuting the isolation of exile and chronic illness into music that shattered classical conventions without ever raising its voice.

French Lyrics
Unknown
French verse possesses a distinct beauty of form and spirit, offering English-speaking readers an invitation to set aside artistic prejudice and discover a rich tradition of lyric expression.

Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition
L. W. (Leonard William) King
Ancient clay records unearthed from Mesopotamian soil rewrite the early history of human civilization. These discoveries reveal that the oldest traditions of Creation, early kings, and the Great Flood originate with the Sumerians long before reaching later cultures.

Men of Iron
Howard Pyle
In a perilous fifteenth-century England where a single misstep seals a nobleman's downfall, an outlawed baron's son must master the harsh arts of chivalry to redeem his family's stolen honor and name.

Pyrometry: A Practical Treatise on the Measurement of High Temperatures
Charles R. (Charles Robert) Darling
A clear, methodically structured survey of the physical principles, structural designs, and industrial applications behind the scientific measurement of high furnace temperatures.

Schools of to-morrow
John Dewey
A revolution stirs quietly in American classrooms as educators replace rigid memorization with active, real-world learning.

Seaport in Virginia: George Washington's Alexandria
Gay Montague Moore
A love letter to the architecture and inhabitants of a colonial port, this work recreates the vanished world of 18th-century Alexandria through the stones and stories that remain.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Stephen Leacock
Sunlight filters through the maples onto small-town Ontario, where grand ambitions routinely collapse into delightfully mild absurdities.

The Accumulation of Capital
Rosa Luxemburg
A rigorous economic inquiry reveals how capitalism must constantly swallow non-capitalist societies to survive, transforming global geography into a arena of imperial expansion, financial debt, and structural crisis.

The Fasting Cure
Upton Sinclair
A radical plea for voluntary starvation, this early twentieth-century treatise promises that abstaining from food clears toxins, restores vitality, and frees the human body from reliance on traditional medicine.

The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902): With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines
O'Rourke, John, Canon
A delicate, water-sensitive crop fails, exposing a structural economic disaster where abundant grain leaves starving harbors and a nation disintegrates under bureaucratic neglect.

The Stephens Family: A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens
Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens
A sprawling chronicle of frontier migration, early American conflict, and multi-generational ties unfolds across two centuries of births, marriages, and westward movement.

England, My England
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
A domestic world of vibrant nature and quiet desperation fractures under the weight of emotional detachment and physical disaster.

Gem-Stones and Their Distinctive Characters
George Frederick Herbert Smith
Nature crafts brilliant crystals beneath immense earth pressures, but only precise physical measurement and disciplined lapidary art unlock the vivid fire inside them.

How I Filmed the War: A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc
Geoffrey H. Malins
A cameraman navigates the mud, shell-fire, and mechanical marvels of the First World War, capturing a reality that forever altered how the public perceived the front line.

John Bull's Other Island
Bernard Shaw
An energetic, highly efficient Englishman and his disaffected Irish partner return to rural Ireland, where romantic mythologies, political ambitions, and corporate land schemes clash under the watchful eye of a defrocked, visionary priest.

Legends of Gods and Ghosts (Hawaiian Mythology): Collected and Translated from the Hawaiian
W. D. (William Drake) Westervelt
High upon mountain ridges, beneath ocean surf, and across the dark paths of the spirit world, human lovers, treacherous chiefs, and shape-shifting dragon-gods wage battles of devotion and revenge.

Peck's Sunshine: Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun
George W. (George Wilbur) Peck
A sharp-eyed observation of Gilded Age life transforms small-town nuisances, political posturing, and domestic mishaps into enduring, slice-of-life comedy.

Plain Tales from the Hills
Rudyard Kipling
These vignettes capture the volatile, insular world of British colonial India, where reputations are fragile, passions are dangerous, and the line between farce and tragedy is perilously thin.

Poems of Nature
Henry David Thoreau
To dwell closely with nature is to trade the noisy slavery of modern ambition for a quiet, boundless realm of light and air.

Ten Boys from Dickens
Kate Dickinson Sweetser
These ten vignettes capture the formative years of Dickensian youth, tracing the paths of boys navigating poverty, ambition, and the stark realities of Victorian society.

The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
Arthur Conan Doyle
A terrifying midnight madness strikes a quiet Cornish village, leaving one sister dead at a card table and her two brothers hopelessly insane.

The Aeneid of Virgil
Virgil
Driven by divine decree and shadowed by tragedy, a displaced prince leads his surviving people across violent seas to build a legendary new home.

The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
A tapestry of love, deceit, magic, and sudden fortune unfolds across the Islamic world, woven together by the relentless compulsion to tell stories.

The Yellow Fairy Book
Unknown
Magic, peril, and strange transformations await inside a world of ancient enchantments, cunning tricksters, and steadfast hearts.

Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader: Being Selections from the Chief American Writers
Benj. N. (Benjamin Nicholas) Martin
A sprawling, ambitious monument to early American thought, this expansive collection captures a young nation wrestling with its moral duties, judicial structures, historic battles, and emerging literary identity.

Dream Tales and Prose Poems
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Spectral lovers, mysterious obsessions, and fleeting visions of mortal pain haunt a world where the boundary between life and death dissolves into shadow.

History of the Union Jack and Flags of the Empire
Barlow Cumberland
Flags are living history, carrying in their stitches the choices, conflicts, and compromises that built an empire.

Iamblichus on the mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians
Iamblichus
A defense of sacred ritual rooted in Neoplatonic metaphysics, this text argues that divine communion is not an illusion of mortal emotion, but a real elevation of the soul.

Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A restless mind escapes the quiet constraints of northern Europe, discovering in the mountain passes and light-drenched ruins of the South a transformative encounter with nature, classical art, and the raw vitality of human life.

Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville
Mary Somerville
A childhood spent roaming free on the Scottish coast gives way to a lifetime of intellectual conquest, turning a quiet, self-taught girl into one of the nineteenth century’s towering scientific figures.

Sevastopol
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Cannon thunder shakes the morning frost over a blood-drenched bay as soldiers, officers, and civilians navigate the relentless, deadly routine of a besieged city.

Swiss Fairy Tales
William Elliot Griffis
A mountain peak glowing red at dusk; a tailor tricking a giant into an eating contest; a clockmaker learning time from an owl: these tales gather the legends of the Alps into one fireside hearth.

The 2002 CIA World Factbook
United States. Central Intelligence Agency
A sweeping compendium of global data, this reference catalog offers an exhaustive, standardized blueprint of the world’s sovereign nations, territories, and oceanic regions as they stood in 2002.

The Woman's Bible
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A rigorous feminist critique dismantles centuries of patriarchal theology, reclaiming ancient scriptures to show that woman’s true moral duty is self-development rather than submissive self-sacrifice.

The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 12 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Miscellany
Robert Green Ingersoll
The human mind finds its highest dignity not in submission to ancient dogmas, but in the unyielding pursuit of intellectual freedom, natural morality, and compassionate reason.

Excursions, and Poems: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume 05 (of 20)
Henry David Thoreau
An observant traveler wanders from New England fields to Canadian fortresses, reading the landscape like an ancient text to find the wild heart hidden beneath human order.