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All free summaries — page 29
1,474 public-domain books, summarised. Page 29 of 31.
The First Book of Adam and Eve
Rutherford Hayes Platt
A vivid retelling of the earliest human story, blending sorrow, hope, and divine promise in a world forever changed by a single transgression.
A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity
William Wilberforce
A society can be religious in name and still live as if religion hardly mattered. Here the complaint is not against unbelief alone, but against the comfortable habits of believers who have lost Christianity’s centre.
The Philippines a Century Hence
José Rizal
A profound meditation on the Philippines’ past, present, and uncertain future, exploring the tensions between colonial rule, national identity, and the quest for liberty.
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
A profound exploration of human nature stripped of illusions, challenging sacred beliefs and inviting readers to embrace a life of free thought beyond tradition and dogma.
The Science of Getting Rich
W. D. (Wallace Delois) Wattles
HOOK Unlock the principles that claim wealth is not luck but a precise science anyone can learn and apply.
The Prairie Mother
Arthur Stringer
A woman’s fierce love and resilience shape life on the harsh Canadian prairie, where family bonds, hardship, and change test the limits of endurance and hope.
The Innocents: A Story for Lovers
Sinclair Lewis
A retired clerk and his practical wife trade city respectability for a wild idea, then discover that adventure is not where they expect it to be. Their journey turns a joke into a hard, comic, unexpectedly tender education.
A Plea for the Criminal: Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles of Criminological and Reformatory Science
James Leslie Allan Kayll
A criminal is treated not as a monster, but as a human problem society helps create and can still help mend.
The Making of Bobby Burnit: Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man
George Randolph Chester
A rich young idler is forced into business, and the people around him are too clever, too crooked, or too loyal by half. What starts as a joke turns into a contest over money, power, and the harder work of becoming adult.
The Subjection of Women
John Stuart Mill
A marriage can be a school of kindness or a form of rule; this book asks why the difference is written into law before it is ever written into character.
The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 01, No. 09 1895: Pulpits of Southern Italy
Various
Explore the shimmering marble and vibrant glass mosaics of Southern Italy’s historic pulpits, where Norman power and Byzantine artistry merged to create the most exquisite liturgical monuments of the Middle Ages.
Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture: Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870
John Ruskin
Ruskin turns sculpture into a moral argument about beauty, truth, and power. What begins as a lesson in form becomes a fight over what a civilization teaches the eye to love.
With Spurs of Gold: Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds
Frances Nimmo Greene
HOOK: These tales keep asking the same hard question: what does honor cost when the world is violent, proud, and full of betrayal? The answer is measured in loyalty, loss, and the strange dignity of steadfast conduct.
Tres Comedias : Sin querer
Jacinto Benavente
HOOK: A clever comedy of masks, marriage, and money keeps turning sincerity into strategy. What begins as trickery ends by asking whether love is the one thing that cannot be faked.
The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
John Trotwood Moore
HOOK A tale of hardship and hope in the Southern cotton mills, where war’s ruin, poverty, and the struggle for dignity shape lives caught between despair and renewal.
Four Plays of Gil Vicente
Gil Vicente
A vivid glimpse into early 16th-century Portuguese life and spirituality, these plays blend allegory, satire, and pastoral charm to explore human nature, society, and the soul’s journey with sharp wit and heartfelt insight.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A beautiful face becomes a testing ground for vanity, art, and moral decay, while the cost of wishing to stay untouched keeps rising in secret.
The Tao Teh King, or the Tao and its Characteristics
Laozi
A tiny book of verses keeps turning the world upside down: weakness defeats strength, stillness masters motion, and the ruler who does least leaves the deepest mark.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon": Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1
Various
A huge reference work can still feel like a story when empires rise, languages clash, machines fail, and a philosopher’s life changes the way later thinkers argue.
Captain Canot
Theodore Canot
A reckless sailor climbs from forecastle brawler to slave-trader, frontier envoy, prisoner, and self-justifying witness to a brutal commerce that depends on luck, nerve, and other people’s ruin.
What Nietzsche Taught
Willard Huntington Wright
HOOK A fierce intellectual journey dismantling inherited morals to reveal a call for human greatness beyond tradition and herd conformity.
Fra Angelico
I. B. (Igino Benvenuto) Supino
A serene monk wields brush and faith to transform sacred visions into luminous frescoes, bridging medieval devotion and Renaissance artistry with celestial grace.
Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets
Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
A city’s soul revealed through its saints, kings, prophets, and poets—Edinburgh’s layered history unfolds in a tapestry of faith, power, and culture that shaped Scotland’s capital.
The Young Railroaders: Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity
Francis Lovell Coombs
Young boys face real dangers and mysteries on the railroad, using quick thinking and courage to protect trains, solve crimes, and outwit villains in thrilling adventures.
Charles I: Makers of History
Jacob Abbott
HOOK A king’s rise and fall, a nation divided by faith and power, and a tragic end that reshaped England forever.
The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Sinclair Lewis
A boy from a tidy Minnesota home longs for motion, risk, and a life larger than duty. Each new ambition promises freedom, then tests what freedom costs.
The Story of Paris
Thomas Okey
Paris appears not as a backdrop but as a long struggle over power, faith, learning, art, and memory.
An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet
Arnold Henry Savage Landor
HOOK A perilous journey into the forbidding heights of Tibet reveals a land of stark beauty, harsh climates, secretive peoples, and relentless challenges that test the limits of endurance and courage.
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
Gerald Stanley Lee
A nation’s spirit is a ghost haunting the White House—how can millions make that ghost a living, powerful presence shaping democracy and leadership?
Flamsted quarries
Mary E. (Mary Ella) Waller
HOOK A sprawling tale of conscience and community, this novel follows Aileen Armagh from New York’s tenements to the granite heart of Flamsted, where social hierarchies and personal sins are tested against the weight of human dignity.
Reflections
François duc de La Rochefoucauld
In these pages, social grace becomes a mask, love a contest of vanity, and virtue itself is constantly suspected of hidden motives.
My Shipmate—Columbus
Stephen Marlowe
A college student who doubts Columbus is sent into the very past he questions, where the famous voyage turns out to depend on fear, drunkenness, and one stubborn act of will.
The Phantom of the River
Edward Sylvester Ellis
A tense frontier tale unfolds where cunning, courage, and survival intertwine along the Ohio River’s wild edge, as settlers face relentless danger from both nature and hostile forces.
The Indian Fairy Book: From the Original Legends
Cornelius Mathews
Step into a world where ancient legends come alive—where cunning heroes, magical creatures, and powerful spirits shape the land and its people in tales told around fires for generations.
Seven Miles to Arden
Ruth Sawyer
HOOK A young Irish actress embarks on a journey through hardship, mystery, and unexpected friendships, discovering the true meaning of kindness and trust far from home.
The Tapestry Book
Helen Churchill Candee
Step into the rich world of tapestry, where ancient craftsmanship, artistic design, and history intertwine in cloth that tells stories across centuries.
John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein
Frank R. Stockton
A gardener’s quiet domain becomes a stage for intertwined tales of love, adventure, invention, and human folly, revealing the rich lives and secrets rooted beneath the surface of a sprawling garden.
Wilmot and Tilley
James Hannay
Two pivotal figures shape the political landscape of 19th-century New Brunswick, navigating colonial governance, reform, and the birth of Canadian confederation.
Erik Dorn
Ben Hecht
A restless man drifts through the shadows of postwar Chicago and Europe, caught between love, ambition, and the haunting void of modern life.
Old Fort Snelling, 1819-1858
Marcus Lee Hansen
A remote military outpost on the Upper Mississippi quietly shaped the fate of a vast frontier, bridging cultures, conflicts, and the relentless push of American expansion.
Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2
Ian Hamilton
A campaign diary where every hopeful advance is shadowed by bad weather, bad maps, and worse timing.
Dikes and Ditches
Oliver Optic
A voyage of youthful discovery unfolds across the canals and dikes of Holland and Belgium, blending adventure with lessons in history, culture, and the challenges of life at sea.
Romance of Roman Villas (The Renaissance)
Elizabeth W. (Elizabeth Williams) Champney
Step into the faded grandeur of Renaissance Italy, where the villas of cardinals and princes whisper stories of power, passion, and art, revealing a world where beauty and intrigue intertwine beneath crumbling facades.
The book of Enoch
R. H. (Robert Henry) Charles
A profound journey through ancient visions reveals cosmic order, divine judgment, and the fate of humanity, blending celestial mysteries with moral reckoning.
The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War: With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland
Cecil Francis Romer
A detailed chronicle of a storied Irish regiment’s grueling campaigns in the South African War and Aden, revealing the harsh realities of colonial warfare and the steadfast spirit of soldiers far from home.
Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
George William Erskine Russell
A reflective journey through the life of a Victorian English politician, revealing the interplay of personal heritage, education, public service, and faith in shaping a man and his times.
Joan of Arc of the North Woods
Holman Day
A timber war turns on pride, money, and one woman who refuses to stay where others place her. In the north woods, a single lie can wreck a drive; a single truth can change who stands with whom.
How the Flag Became Old Glory
Scott, Emma Look, Mrs.
A flag’s journey from a simple banner to a cherished national symbol unfolds through battles, sacrifices, and the stories of those who bore it with pride and conviction.