Free summaries
General — page 7
338 public-domain general books, summarised. Page 7 of 8.
Days with Walt Whitman
Edward Carpenter
A gentle, observant portrait of a literary titan in his twilight years, this volume captures the quiet magnetism of a man who famously sang of the world, yet lived in its smallest corners.
Drift and mastery
Walter Lippmann
Modern industry has created an environment without historical precedent, demanding that society move past blind habit and embrace conscious, scientific mastery.
Edible fats and oils
W. H. (William Herbert) Simmons
This technical manual offers a precise, nineteenth-century view into the chemistry, trade, and industrial processing of edible fats. It serves as both a snapshot of early food science and a guide for detecting the rampant adulteration of common kitchen staples.
Ex-wife
Ursula Parrott
When a twenty-four-year-old New York advertising writer is unexpectedly deserted by her husband, she plunges headlong into the dazzling, painful labyrinth of post-war marital experimentation and modern freedom.
Final report of the Pennsylvania Chestnut Tree Blight Commission
Pennsylvania. Chestnut Tree Blight Commission
An administrative account of a desperate early-twentieth-century campaign to halt the total destruction of an iconic forest tree by an unstoppable fungal blight.
History of Unity, Maine
James R. Taber
A diligent account of a Maine town’s first century, this volume chronicles the quiet transformation of a wilderness settlement into a stable, enduring community through the lives of its inhabitants.
Household words, No. 1, March 30, 1850
Unknown
This publication serves as an ambitious bridge between the Victorian industrial era and the domestic hearth, offering a miscellany of social inquiry, fiction, and practical advice. It captures the curiosity and moral earnestness of a period defined by rapid urban growth and emerging global connectivity.
In case of fire
Walter Kellogg Towers
Two friends embark on a chaotic road trip with a fire truck, leading to unexpected adventures and a brush with the law.
In the scarlet star
Jack Williamson
A penniless young engineer in El Paso acquires a mysterious scarlet crystal star that opens a gateway to a primordial, time-warped alternate world.
Inscriptions from Dante's Divina Commedia in the streets of Florence
Ida Riedisser
The streets of Florence are paved with the memories of a poet, where stone inscriptions serve as silent witnesses to the city's medieval heart and the lasting scars of its political feuds.
Intellectual things
Stanley J. Kunitz
The universe is a crystalline geometry of thought and feeling, where the individual mind struggles to reconcile the permanence of the soul with the inevitable decay of the flesh.
Life of a licensed victualler's daughter
Mary Ann Ashford
The true story of a woman navigating the precarious labor and domestic struggles of nineteenth-century London, this memoir serves as a quiet testament to the resilience of the working class.
Malice in Kulturland
Horace Wyatt
When illness traps young Alice in bed, her fevered imagination transforms the newspapers' reports of global tension into a surreal, satirical woodland march toward the First World War.
Mr. Fortune's maggot
Sylvia Townsend Warner
A lonely missionary finds his rigid faith unraveling under the influence of a tropical paradise and a singular, unexpected friendship. This quiet, observant story captures the profound disorientation of a man whose life’s purpose is dismantled by the very beauty he sought to convert.
Mrs. Mayo's second husband
Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs.
A man facing death discovers a sudden, piercing jealousy of his wife’s future, triggering a confrontation that exposes the hollow foundation of their marriage. This intimate domestic drama unfolds in the shadow of the grave, challenging the complacency of a husband who realizes too late that he has been a stranger…
Mrs. Rule's Foundlings
Annette Lyster
A solitary London laundress discovers that opening her heart to others breaks her isolated routine, drawing her into a tangled mystery of lost children and family secrets.
No title
Unknown
A penniless artist invents a fake marriage to appease a wealthy uncle, plunging his entire social circle into a chaotic comedy of deception.
Old New England houses
Albert G. (Albert Gardner) Robinson
A meditation on the quiet endurance of New England’s early architecture, this work explores how the homes of the past reveal the character, craftsmanship, and daily lives of the region’s first generations.
On the theory of light and colours
Thomas Young
Light travels not as a stream of flying particles, but as waves moving through an all-pervading elastic ether.
Our money and the state
Hartley Withers
Fiscal responsibility is not merely a matter of bookkeeping, but a vital duty of the citizen to the state. This exploration of public finance argues that a nation’s health depends on how it funds its existence.
Realizable ideals
Theodore Roosevelt
A call to action for the individual citizen, these lectures argue that the health of a democracy depends entirely on the private integrity and public courage of its ordinary members.
Recollections of Juliana
Clare I. MacDonald
A sharp-tongued, fiercely independent Gullah cook navigates the shifting worlds of post-Civil War Sea Islands, binding a young white mistress and her household to her unyielding loyalty.
Seven brothers
Aleksis Kivi
Rebellious and wild, seven brothers flee civilization for the dark virgin forests of Finland, where they battle nature, the law, and their own unruly passions before finding peace.
Snow-berries
Alice Cary
This collection of moral tales and verse offers a gentle, grounded examination of life’s daily rhythms, favoring the beauty of the ordinary over the artifice of fairy stories. It invites readers to find significance in the modest joys and inevitable struggles of a life lived close to the soil.
Some ethical gains through legislation
Florence Kelley
Legislation secures essential human rights—childhood, leisure, consumer knowledge, and political voice—transforming social ethics into legal protections against industrial exploitation.
Songs of a Red Cross nurse
Brookes More
HOOK A series of lyrical, interconnected poems documenting the harrowing experiences of a nurse and her soldier companions during the Great War, blending battlefield grit with the enduring power of devotion.
Stopping 'em with lead
W. Wirt
This is a hard-boiled tale of the American Southwest and the high seas, where federal agents, lawmen, and smugglers collide in a fast-paced game of pursuit and retribution. It is an artifact of 1920s pulp fiction, steeped in the era’s stark, unforgiving view of justice and its casual, often brutal, approach to…
Summer camp
Anne Herbert
A swank girls’ summer camp descends into a fever dream of hidden agendas, where one young counselor navigates a web of desire, coercion, and the search for an elusive moral truth.
Sword play, based upon the French school of the foil
Scott Dudley Breckinridge
The precision of the blade is a discipline of the mind, demanding that every movement serve a clear, tactical purpose. To master the foil is to embrace a language of constant, calculated exchange.
The American shotgun
Charles Askins
A practical, razor-sharp guide to the mechanics and fieldcraft of the scattergun, written by a marksman who trusts numbers, hand-eye integration, and common sense over advertising mythology.
The castaways
James Otis
An ordinary summer voyage turns into a desperate struggle for survival when a group of castaways finds refuge on a lonely coral key.
The flapper wife
Beatrice Burton
A young woman rejects the domestic life of her mother, only to discover that her pursuit of modern independence threatens the very marriage she hoped to keep.
The grandmothers
Glenway Wescott
A boy grows up among a family of towering pioneers whose unwritten lives and vanishing cabins shadow his every step, until he maps their struggles in a haunting biography of America.
The Ladies of Lyndon
Margaret Kennedy
HOOK A portrait of a young woman’s calculated marriage to a wealthy baronet, and the quiet, devastating unraveling of the social façade that she believes will secure her future.
The last poems of Alice Meynell
Alice Meynell
These final verses capture a lifetime of intellectual poise, distilling the weight of mortality into precise, luminous lines that seek beauty within the inevitable boundaries of the human condition.
The life story of gipsy Cornelius Smith
Cornelius Smith
This is a raw, urgent account of a man’s journey from the margins of Victorian society to the pulpit, fueled by a transformative religious awakening. It captures the singular experience of a life redefined by faith.
The next-to-last laugh
Raoul Whitfield
A veteran test pilot risks his life in a revolutionary, bird-inspired aircraft designed by an eccentric inventor, racing toward a catastrophic reckoning in the open skies above Rook Field.
The pageant of Parliament, vol. 2 of 2
Michael MacDonagh
This guided tour through the corridors of Westminster reveals the inner machinery of the British government, demystifying the rituals and human quirks that underpin centuries of parliamentary tradition. It serves as an intimate chronicle of how laws are forged, how politicians behave when the public isn't watching,…
The puzzle planet
Robert A.W. Lowndes
The mystery of a remote world unfolds through the eyes of a communications expert sent to solve a series of increasingly lethal "practical jokes" and a murder among a small expedition of scientists.
The Salvation Army in Switzerland
Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler
The Salvation Army’s arrival in Switzerland in 1882 sparked a turbulent clash between fervent evangelism and the state, testing the limits of religious liberty in a nation long considered a sanctuary for diverse ideas.
The sky jinx
Raoul Whitfield
The sky hums with tension when a pilot branded by disaster joins a new squadron, testing the fragile loyalties of men bound by war and shared danger.
The spoiled Buddha
Helen Waddell
This fable of a fallen disciple and a weary god explores the weight of eternity and the persistent, human pull of desire. It is a quiet, contemplative play that finds profound comedy in the sacred.
The story of patriarchs and prophets
Ellen Gould Harmon White
This account traces the epic struggle between divine light and human rebellion through the lives of early biblical figures. It offers a perspective on moral choice, framing ancient history as a universal conflict of character.
The story of the world a thousand years hence
Henry Olerich
A utopian blueprint for the future, this work envisions a rational, scientific society where cooperative living and the end of "outside ownership" create a terrestrial paradise for all of humanity.
Traditions and stories of Scottish castles
A. H. Millar
A weathered keep stands sentinel over rolling hills, guarding centuries of rugged Border history and local lore.
Undream'd of shores
Frank Harris
These sketches explore the precarious intersection of talent, desire, and moral compromise in the lives of artists and dreamers. They examine the high cost of seeking beauty in a world indifferent to its worth.
Valiant dust
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
HOOK These stories navigate the fragile border between the rational world and the encroaching supernatural, where the most terrifying ghosts are often the ones we carry within ourselves.
Variations
James Huneker
The critic as artist navigates a world of shifting melodies and literary ghosts, finding that the most profound truths often emerge from the collision of disparate, passionate ideas.