The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 242
11,874 public-domain books, summarised. Page 242 of 248.
Parisians in the Country
Honoré de Balzac
Parisian ambition and country life clash in a biting satirical pairing about vanity, social climbing, and romantic disillusionment.
Rides on Railways
Samuel Sidney
Boarding early Victorian steam engines, passengers speed toward distant landscapes while witnessing the dramatic transformation of English industry, architecture, and daily life.
Sinhalese Folklore Notes, Ceylon
Arthur A. Perera
The natural world vibrates with omen, sacred duty, and lingering magic across the mountains, paddy fields, and ancient shrines of Sri Lanka.
Solitude: With the Life of the Author. In Two Parts
Johann Georg Zimmermann
A quiet mind finds in retreat the clarity, virtue, and moral strength that the clamor of public life relentlessly erodes.
The Adventure of the Red Circle
Arthur Conan Doyle
A desperate landlady seeks help when her secretive new lodger vanishes into a locked room, leaving only printed notes and mysterious signals across a darkened London street.
The Author's Craft
Arnold Bennett
Observation requires active engagement, yet most people pass through the world in a haze, noticing nothing of the life unfolding around them.
The Charm of Gardens
Dion Clayton Calthrop
A meditative trek across the green expanse of the English countryside reveals how gardens, history, and quiet human connections cultivate the soul.
The Children of the Poor
Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis
Desperate lives unfold in the shadowed, overcrowded tenement districts of late nineteenth-century Manhattan, where children struggle to survive amid extreme poverty and neglect.
The Duchess of Padua
Oscar Wilde
A son swears blood revenge against his father’s murderer, only to discover that love renders his dagger useless and dooms everyone involved.
The Hungry Heart: A Novel
David Graham Phillips
A woman’s urgent need for intellectual equal partnership meets the cold reality of a conventional marriage, sparking a quiet domestic rebellion in turn-of-the-century Indiana.
The Joyful Heart
Robert Haven Schauffler
A vibrant supply of energy lies waiting inside every human soul, ready to transform ordinary days into deliberate acts of creation.
The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915
Various
Courage, terror, and bureaucratic precision collide as eyewitnesses and official dispatches chronicle the chaotic, bloody opening months of the First World War.
The Number "e"
Unknown
A monumental display of sheer computation, this text presents the fundamental mathematical constant $e$ expanded to roughly 100,000 decimal places.
The Standard Operas: Their Plots, Their Music, and Their Composers: (12th edition)
George P. (George Putnam) Upton
A structured guide unlocks the dramatic stories, famous musical numbers, and historical origins behind classical opera's most enduring stage masterpieces.
The Tapestried Chamber, and Death of the Laird's Jock
Walter Scott
A ghostly encounter in a secured chamber and a dying Border chieftain’s final, roaring heartbreak reveal how swiftly human pride crumbles before supernatural terror and national dishonor.
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2)
Charles Darwin
A deep, meticulous exploration of how living traits pass down through generations, mutate under human hands, and reveal the hidden mechanisms of biological inheritance.
A History of Pendennis, Volume 1: His fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest enemy
William Makepeace Thackeray
A young man's vanity is his own greatest enemy as he navigates the temptations of nineteenth-century England.
A Literary and Historical Atlas of Asia
J. G. (John George) Bartholomew
A sweeping cartographic survey bridges ancient imperial footprints and modern colonial borders across the vast Asiatic continent.
A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 11
Unknown
A wide-ranging collection of early seventeenth-century plays captures the humor, sharp-tongued wit, and theatrical flair of Jacobean London.
An Historical Mystery (The Gondreville Mystery)
Honoré de Balzac
A fearless young royalist aristocrat and her devoted bailiff clash with Napoleon's imperial police in a high-stakes struggle of political conspiracy, framed kidnapping, and sacrificial devotion.
Books and their makers during the Middle Ages
George Haven Putnam
The hand-copied manuscript and the printed page shaped the preserve of human thought across thirteen centuries of European history.
Changing China
William Gascoyne-Cecil
An ancient civilization stands at a treacherous crossroad, caught between traditional philosophy and the rushing tide of Western technology. If it adopts raw industrial materialism without an ethical anchor, the resulting clash of global ambitions could plunge the world into unspeakable conflict.
Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America
George Santayana
An outsider’s affectionate yet unsparing gaze uncovers the hidden tensions animating the young, restless soul of early twentieth-century America.
Comrades: A Story of Social Adventure in California
Dixon, Thomas, Jr.
A wealthy young idealist surrenders his fortune to establish an egalitarian utopia on an isolated California island, only to discover how quickly absolute communal power turns to tyranny.
Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
Clarence Darrow
Human behavior, like every physical phenomenon in the universe, is governed by absolute laws of cause and effect, making moral blame a cruel illusion.
Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A visionary bonfire on a vast Western prairie promises to rid humanity of all its accumulated rubbish, but burning history, law, and art cannot cleanse the source of human flaw.
Essays on Political Economy
Frédéric Bastiat
True wealth consists in the abundance of real goods and services, while state intervention often produces subtle, unseen harms that far outweigh its visible benefits.
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIV
Alexander Maclaren
A quiet, luminous exploration of John's Gospel, showing how an ancient sacred text speaks directly to the permanent longings, struggles, and quiet questions of the human heart.
Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know
Unknown
Lacking fancy fixings, a humble family shares what they have and finds warmth in unexpected company.
Goody Two-Shoes: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1766
Anonymous
Left destitute by a grasping landlord, a orphaned farmgirl relies on cheerfulness and a box of wooden alphabet blocks to make her way in eighteenth-century rural England. She turns literacy into a community mission, overcoming accusations of witchcraft to earn a fortune and secure her place in society.
Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Unknown
Individual greatness rarely springs from isolated genius; it is forged through relentless devotion, sudden revolutions, and the quiet persistence that reshapes human society.
How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves
Orison Swett Marden
A collection of firsthand interviews reveals how late-nineteenth-century icons converted sheer persistence, strict self-discipline, and focused mental effort into extraordinary American fortunes and careers.
How to conquer stupidity
Leo Markun
To act foolishly is a universal human trait, yet we routinely mistake unexamined habits, emotional impulses, and superficial credentials for fixed intelligence. Overcoming our daily lapses requires treating clear thinking not as an innate gift, but as a deliberate discipline.
Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo
William Le Queux
A handsome young Englishman finds himself accused of a crime he did not commit after a shadowy figure is shot just as she is about to reveal the secret behind his father’s tragic death.
Magic: A Fantastic Comedy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
In an aristocratic English drawing room, a cynical stage magician performs a genuinely miraculous act, shattering the fragile, narrow worldviews of the skeptics and dreamers gathered around him.
Mildred at Roselands: A Sequel to Mildred Keith
Martha Finley
When an invalid young woman travels south to recover her health, she finds herself navigating the social hazards of a wealthy plantation, where quiet moral choices shape every family dynamic.
Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes
C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine) Hartley
Safeguarding the next generation requires honoring the physical realities of reproduction and placing the responsibilities of motherhood at the very center of human society.
My Book of Indoor Games
Clarence Squareman
A turn-of-the-century gathering comes alive as simple household items and lively group dynamics turn any ordinary parlor or classroom into an arena of shared play.
My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt
Corinne Roosevelt Robinson
An intimate sisterly window onto the life of Theodore Roosevelt, this memoir traces a fragile, nature-obsessed boy as he grows into a formidable leader through sheer grit and deep familial love.
Nuggets of the New Thought: Several Things That Have Helped People
William Walker Atkinson
To cultivate a mind of confidence, strength, and inner peace, one must cast aside fear and learn to resonate in harmony with universal law.
Nuts to crack
Richard Gooch
An irrepressible gallery of university wits, eccentrics, and collegiate rogues fills this lively nineteenth-century compendium of academic folklore.
Our Foreigners: A Chronicle of Americans in the Making
Samuel Peter Orth
A sweeping, three-century wave of human migration transformed a forested wilderness into a complex, multi-ethnic republic.
Preface to Major Barbara: First Aid to Critics
Bernard Shaw
Grounded in the social realities of industrial Britain, this polemical essay dismantling the myths surrounding poverty, charity, and institutional morality reveals that economic starvation is a societal crime rather than a personal failing.
Record of Medals of Honor issued to the officers and enlisted men of the United States Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, 1862-1923
United States. Bureau of Naval Personnel
A comprehensive record of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard's Medal of Honor recipients from 1862 to 1923.
Sea-gift: A Novel
Edwin W. (Edwin Wiley) Fuller
A young North Carolina man grows up along the coast, journeys to college in Chapel Hill, and sees his peaceful world shattered by the Civil War.
Tales from the X-bar Horse Camp: The Blue-Roan "Outlaw" and Other Stories
Will C. (Will Croft) Barnes
Riding through red-rock canyons, flash floods, and blinding sandstorms, the cowboys and range riders of the turn-of-the-century Southwest confront stampeding herds, outlaw steers, and the rugged, unforgiving wilderness of an American frontier fast passing into history.
The Chemistry of Plant Life
Roscoe Wilfred Thatcher
Plant life operates as a structured, self-regulating chemical factory, converting raw elements into complex living matter through precise molecular mechanisms.
The Death of the Gods: (Christ and Antichrist, 1 of 3)
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky
A fourth-century emperor attempts to turn back the clock of history, pitting the dying gods of pagan antiquity against the relentless rise of a young Christian church.