The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 195
9,354 public-domain books, summarised. Page 195 of 195.
Perpetual Motion
Henry Dircks
Ingenious artisans and ambitious theorists spend lifetimes chasing an impossible mechanical ideal, devising endless configurations of weights, fluids, and magnets that inevitably grind to a dead stop.
Philosophumena
Antipope Hippolytus
A fierce second-century crusade against early Christian heresies unmasks esoteric movements by tracking their ideas back to ancient Greek philosophy and magic rather than scripture.
Poor Miss Finch
Wilkie Collins
A young blind woman falls in love with a man whose physical transformation threatens their future, forcing a choice between sight, truth, and devotion.
Sir Thomas More
Unknown
An urban riot, a sudden elevation to power, and a quiet, unyielding conscience drive this Tudor play toward its inevitable scaffold.
Tales and Novels
Maria Edgeworth
An impulsive young man in eighteenth-century Ireland navigates shifting social fortunes, volatile guardians, and his own fiery temper as he seeks to govern his character and secure a place in the world.
The 1893 Duryea Automobile In the Museum of History and Technology
Donald H. Berkebile
A meticulous engineering history unearths the painstaking triumphs, mechanical missteps, and forgotten details behind the creation of one of America's earliest successful gasoline automobiles.
The Country of Sir Walter Scott
Charles S. (Charles Sumner) Olcott
Traveling through rugged Scottish glens, historic English castles, and wind-swept islands, a dedicated literary explorer maps the physical landscapes and living traditions that inspired Sir Walter Scott’s iconic poems and Waverley novels.
The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, volume 1 (of 2): By His Wife, Isabel Burton
Burton, Isabel, Lady
An unquenchable thirst for original experience drives a British officer and scholar across continents, breaking social conventions and official mandates alike.
The Modern Traveller
Hilaire Belloc
An absurd, colonial-era expedition spirals into complete disaster, exposed through the shameless, self-serving narrative of its sole survivor.
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
John Lothrop Motley
A small European province wages an eighty-year war of liberation against the world's most formidable empire, giving birth to a self-governing republic rooted in religious freedom.
Trinity Site
National Atomic Museum (U.S.)
In the remote desert of New Mexico, a top-secret wartime project culminates in an explosion that forever alters human history and technology.
Turkish fairy tales and folk tales
R. Nisbet (Robert Nisbet) Bain
In these traditional Anatolian and Roumanian tales, ordinary peasants, cunning fools, and bold princes venture into strange wildernesses where magic mirrors command armies and death lies waiting in forgotten coffers.
Twenty Years' Residence among the People of Turkey: Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Turks, and Armenians
Fanny Janet Sandison Blunt
Observation, insight, and years of residence replace quick judgments to reveal the authentic, multifaceted life of the Ottoman Empire’s diverse populations.
Watchbird
Robert Sheckley
An automated machine designed to eliminate violent crime assumes the role of moral arbiter, gradually expanding its definition of murder until human life itself is held hostage by cold, algorithmic logic.
An inland voyage
Robert Louis Stevenson
Two men paddle small canoes through the canals and swelling rivers of northern France, trading the dull routine of ledger books and respectable offices for wet clothes, roadside inns, and the quiet rhythm of the open stream.
Armour & Weapons
Charles John Ffoulkes
This study provides an essential, technically grounded overview of European defensive equipment, demystifying the development of mail and plate for the non-specialist. It bridges the gap between romanticized fiction and the practical realities of historical warfare.
Beatrix
Honoré de Balzac
A secluded Breton youth falls under the spell of an elusive Parisian noblewoman, plunging his traditional family and devout young wife into a storm of urban intrigue, pride, and romantic rivalry.
Einstein and the universe: A popular exposition of the famous theory
Charles Nordmann
A ray of light traverses the cosmos at an unyielding speed, shattering our long-held assumptions about time, space, and the very architecture of reality.
Ernest Maltravers
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
A gifted young philosopher turns his back on worldly ambition to mold an unsophisticated girl, only to trigger a chain of romantic disillusionments, tragic misunderstandings, and political rivalry across Europe.
Great Musical Composers: German, French, and Italian
George T. (George Titus) Ferris
This historical survey traces the lives, artistic evolutions, and personal struggles of Western Europe’s premier classical composers, illustrating how individual genius reshaped the landscape of opera, symphony, and sacred song.
H. R
Edwin Lefevre
A young bank clerk turns spectacle, advertising, and public sentiment into instruments of personal advancement, conquering New York society by sheer force of personality.
History of the Commune of 1871
Lissagaray
A desperate city, abandoned by its leaders, takes up arms to defend its autonomy and its vision of a democratic republic against a reactionary government.
Light and Peace: Instructions for devout souls to dispel their doubts and allay their fears
Carlo Giuseppe Quadrupani
Quiet peace replaces anxious scrupulosity when the soul learns to distinguish between uninvited feelings and deliberate consent.
Practical Education, Volume I
Maria Edgeworth
True learning flourishes not through rigid theories or artificial rewards, but through patient observation, practical experience, and the clear, honest engagement of a child's natural curiosity.
The Adventures of Harry Rochester: A Tale of the Days of Marlborough and Eugene
Herbert Strang
An honest young Englishman frames his own destiny through courage and resourcefulness, navigating perilous Jacobite plots and battlefield glory in eighteenth-century Europe.
The Awkward Age
Henry James
An older gentleman re-enters London society only to find that the girl he wishes to save has already been exposed to its compromised world.
The Creation of God
Jacob Hartmann
Demolishing claims of divine revelation with clinical detachment, a nineteenth-century physician scrutinizes sacred history through the unyielding lens of modern science and human biology.
The Doves' Nest, and Other Stories
Katherine Mansfield
A quiet ache runs through these pages, where small daily rituals mask deep emotional distances and sudden, quiet reckonings.
The Fairy Book: The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
A curated library of traditional folklore offers young readers classic wonder while preserving the vivid, rustic simplicity of original oral storytelling.
The History of Oswestry: Comprising the British, Saxon, Norman, and English eras
William Cathrall
A border region’s long march from ancient bloodshed to civic routine unfolds across centuries of conflict, law-making, and commercial growth.
The Little Lady of Lagunitas: A Franco-Californian Romance
Richard Savage
A sprawling frontier melodrama gives way to a globe-trotting story of conspiracy, deceit, and rightful inheritance in nineteenth-century California and Europe.
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
da Vinci Leonardo
An unyielding insistence on direct observation transforms the world into a boundless laboratory, mapping the hidden mechanics of light, shadow, form, and nature.
The Russian Turmoil
Anton Ivanovich Denikin
A high-ranking general provides a front-line autopsy of the collapse of the Imperial Russian Army, tracing how institutional decay, political vacillation, and relentless radical propaganda unraveled a nation's military power during the turbulent months of 1917.
The Student's Elements of Geology
Lyell, Charles, Sir
A physical history of the earth written from its rock layers, watercourses, and fossil remains.
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 09 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Political
Robert Green Ingersoll
Democracy relies upon unyielding personal independence, where the right to think and speak freely surpasses all political power.
Turgenev: A Study
Edward Garnett
A delicate, masterful mind turns its gaze upon Russian life, catching the subtle human truths and national shifts hidden within a changing world.
A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance: With special reference to the influence of Italy in the formation and development of modern classicism
Joel Elias Spingarn
The Renaissance transformed the ancient Greek understanding of poetry into a rigid system of rules, a shift that defined the literary standards of the modern world for centuries to come.
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady
Samuel Richardson
Driven away from her family by an arranged marriage and trapped by a scheming libertine, a dutiful young woman fights to preserve her independence and virtue against relentless deception.
Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth
John A. (John Augustine) Ryan
An ethical framework balances economic realism with moral duty, seeking to evaluate how society distributes its wealth among landowners, capitalists, business managers, and wage-earning workers.
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
A condemned woman stalls her execution by weaving nightly tales of wonder, binding her monarch's fate to her unfinished stories.
To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. I
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
A lone traveler retraces his historical steps across Atlantic archipelagos and West African outposts, bound for the goldfields of Ghana.
Work: A Story of Experience
Louisa May Alcott
A young woman sets out into the world to earn her own living, discovering that honest labor, self-reliance, and sisterhood offer the truest path to a meaningful life.