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All free summaries — page 31
34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 31 of 714.
The island of Doctor Moreau
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A harrowing, visionary nightmare of science stripped of empathy, where the boundary separating man from beast dissolves in the surgical blood of an isolated Pacific island.
The Search for the Silver City: A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan
James Otis
A sudden gale, a shattered yacht, and an uncharted wilderness push three castaways into a dangerous journey toward a legendary, hidden city of silver.
Politics: A Treatise on Government
Aristotle
Human beings are built to live in a community, but constructing a society that allows every individual to achieve a good and happy life requires understanding the fragile balance between law, virtue, and power.
Robin Redbreast: A Story for Girls
Mrs. Molesworth
A chance encounter outside a charming red-brick house draws three roomed-away siblings into the long-shadowed family secrets of an elderly heiress. In navigating old grudges and sudden inheritances, a proud girl learns the true measure of generosity.
Adrift in the Ice-Fields
Charles Winslow Hall
A gripping tale of survival and adventure unfolds amid the vast, frozen ice-fields of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where hunters face nature’s harshest trials and unexpected human dramas.
On prayer and the contemplative life
Thomas, Aquinas, Saint
A 13th-century philosopher and theologian explores the nature of prayer, contemplation, and the spiritual life.
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
A tale of love, duty, and societal constraints in Gilded Age New York.
The Approach to Philosophy
Ralph Barton Perry
A practical mind seeking a reasoned life already possesses the seeds of a personal system of thought.
Theft: A Play In Four Acts
Jack London
In the backrooms and drawing rooms of turn-of-the-century Washington, political power is not voted upon—it is bought, packaged, and traded like raw livestock.
Cautionary Tales for Children
Hilaire Belloc
An anarchic collection of cautionary verse exposes the dreadful fates awaiting ill-behaved Victorian children with hilarious, unblinking brutality.
Essays of Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
A bitter, brilliant, and unyielding mind lays bare the hidden engines of human existence, dismantling everyday illusions about romance, intellect, and belief to reveal the relentless drive pulsing beneath our lives.
The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4: Commander in Chief of the American Forces During the War
John Marshall
A foundational military commander must lay down his sword to forge a fragile republic, navigating mutinous troops, fierce political rivalries, and the precarious birth of American constitutional government.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Disillusioned expatriates drift across Europe, seeking purpose in alcohol, spectacle, and fleeting passions while nursing the invisible wounds of a shattered world.
Lectures on the French Revolution
Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
HOOK A profound exploration of the French Revolution’s origins, unfolding, and aftermath, revealing the complex interplay of ideas, personalities, and political forces that reshaped France and Europe.
How It All Came Round
L. T. Meade
An stolen inheritance threatens to tear two London families apart, but an unyielding web of conscience, love, and childhood innocence slowly turns a dark crime into a quiet triumph of grace.
Short Stories of Various Types
Unknown
HOOK A diverse collection of short stories spanning humor, adventure, mystery, and human drama, each revealing unique slices of life and character with a timeless, unvarnished voice.
The Book of Romance
Unknown
A sweeping collection of medieval and legendary tales, weaving chivalry, quests, and heroic deeds into a timeless tapestry of romance and adventure.
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 13: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers
Elbert Hubbard
HOOK Love’s many faces emerge through intimate portraits of history’s great lovers, revealing their passions, struggles, and the human truths behind their stories.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England
Bede, the Venerable, Saint
A nation’s conversion is told as a chain of wars, councils, visions, and deaths. What begins as Roman Britain ends as a Christian kingdom learning how to remember itself.
The Varmint
Owen Johnson
HOOK A spirited tale of boyhood at a New Jersey boarding school, capturing the trials, friendships, and growth of a mischievous youth finding his place.
World's War Events, Vol. II
Unknown
A detailed chronicle of World War I’s pivotal battles, political shifts, and human experiences, revealing the war’s vast scope and complexity through firsthand accounts and official reports.
Just so stories
Rudyard Kipling
HOOK Whimsical tales explain how animals got their unique traits, blending myth, humor, and a childlike curiosity about the natural world.
Essay on the Creative Imagination
Th. (Théodule) Ribot
Every human mind possesses a creative spark that transforms raw experience into novel forms, driving artistic expression, scientific discovery, and practical innovation.
The Finer Grain
Henry James
A country of debts, pride, and late-in-life reckonings narrows to a few charged encounters. Henry James turns social rescue into an inquiry about who owes whom, and what love becomes when money and memory cannot be separated.
A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion
Epictetus
Freedom is not obtained by securing external power, but by mastering one's own mind. These ancient Stoic teachings offer a rigorous, practical framework for maintaining inner peace amidst life’s inevitable turmoil, physical suffering, and social pressure.
The Ordinance of Covenanting
John Cunningham
A rigorous defense of solemn vows as part of religious life, arguing that covenant-making binds believers, churches, and nations to God’s authority.
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
Isolation, emotional starvation, and the crushing weight of duty converge in a bleak New England village, where a trapped man’s desperate bid for warmth ends in a tragic, permanent imprisonment.
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
A state’s ultimate wealth and empire do not rest on marching armies alone, but on controlling the fluid highway of the world’s oceans.
The Choice of Life
Georgette Leblanc
Two women meet in a rural French village, bound by a high-minded experiment: one attempts to rescue the other from a life of dull despair through beauty, culture, and love.
Sir Walter Ralegh: A Biography
W. (William) Stebbing
A meteoric courtier challenges the Spanish empire, crafts enduring prose in a cell, and faces execution with unflinching poise, leaving behind a contested legacy of intellect, ambition, and tragic hubris.
Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value
Harry Snyder
A clear-eyed, practical investigation into the science of everyday sustenance shows how basic chemical principles, proper cooking, and thoughtful household hygiene transform common ingredients into true physical and economic efficiency.
The Girl and the Bill: An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure
Bannister Merwin
A simple five-dollar bill carrying a scribbled secret pulls an unsuspecting Eastern lawyer into a high-stakes conspiracy across Chicago, where foreign agents, midnight chases, and an extraordinary woman reshape his world forever.
The Vampyre
John William Polidori
A wealthy, idealistic young Englishman travels Europe alongside an enigmatic aristocrat, only to discover that his companion's cold detachment conceals an ancient, deadly predatory nature.
Children's Books and Their Illustrators
Gleeson White
Delightfully detailed and deeply knowledgeable, this nineteenth-century study traces how nursery literature transformed from dry moral tracts into vibrant works of art.
Emile
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A profound meditation on education, nature, and human development that challenges conventional methods and explores how to nurture a free, virtuous individual.
In the Mayor's Parlour
J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
A reformer lies stabbed across his desk in a locked municipal hall, leaving an ancient English borough to confront its own long-buried corruption.
Master of the Vineyard
Myrtle Reed
A quiet, small-town young woman bound by iron circumstance finds her world altered when an upper-class visitor enters her rural valley, sparking a tangled exploration of duty, sacrifice, and spiritual devotion.
A dictionary of American authors
Oscar Fay Adams
A quiet ledger of early American thought captures the vast array of nineteenth-century minds, preserving thousands of brief literary lives alongside their long-forgotten works.
Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope
Victor Appleton
A giant green lens from space allows a young inventor to look past the limits of human sight and peer into the secrets of the cosmos.
Hester's Counterpart: A Story of Boarding School Life
Jean K. (Jean Katherine) Baird
Two lookalike schoolgirls, an anxious aunt guarding a dark secret, and a sudden river flood collision turn a routine year at Dickinson Seminary into an unexpected journey of identity and self-discovery.
The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler
David Brewster
Three towering minds of the Renaissance fight to uncover the mechanics of the universe, only to find their breakthroughs answered by poverty, religious intolerance, house arrest, and exile.
A Little Girl in Old Boston
Amanda M. Douglas
A child of transatlantic ties steps onto the cobblestones of a post-Revolutionary city, finding that warmth, kin, and quiet grace can soften even the sternest inherited traditions.
Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought
C. G. (Carl Gustav) Jung
A primal energy courses through human history, casting the same vivid patterns of myth, vision, and longing into modern minds as it did into ancient cultures.
The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures
Lorinda Munson Bryant
A grand museum tour captured in prose, this classic guide introduces young minds to masterworks through the human stories, legends, and artistic choices behind them.
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)
Arthur Schopenhauer
Behind the world of solid objects, passing time, and physical causes operates a single, relentless drive that fuels all life, creates every tragedy, and can only be quieted when human consciousness learns to look past its own desires.
Devil-Worship in France
Arthur Edward Waite
Sensationalist allegations of devil-worship in high-grade Freemasonry collapse under meticulous historical scrutiny, exposing a vast web of literary fraud, anti-Masonic paranoia, and fabricated occult exposes in nineteenth-century Paris.
The Foot-path Way
Bradford Torrey
An observant walk through New England woods and coastlines reveals the quiet drama of bird life and plant world for anyone patient enough to stop and look.
The Youth of Jefferson
John Esten Cooke
Before he drafted the Declaration of Independence or governed Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was a college student in Williamsburg, getting into scrapes, pining over young women, and avoiding his books.