The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 190
34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 190 of 714.
The Scarecrow of Oz
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A whirlpool swallows a little girl and a peg-legged sailor, plunging them into subterranean caverns where only an extraordinary flying creature can lift them back to the light.
The Siberian Overland Route from Peking to Petersburg,: Through the Deserts and Steppes of Mongolia, Tartary, &c
Alexander Michie
Across five thousand miles of frozen steppes, desert wastes, and muddy riverways, a Victorian merchant turns a brutal four-month journey into a sharp, remarkably modern study of imperial expansion.
The Tin Woodman of Oz: A Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, Assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A quest for forgotten love leads a tin monarch and his quirky companions across wild territories, where magical perils tested their resolve and revealed that time moves on even in a land without death.
Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of Giovanni Duprè
Giovanni Duprè
A sickly boy abandoned in an empty workshop grows up to challenge Europe's artistic elite through sheer stubborn honesty, carving a life where religious faith and direct observation of nature overcome professional jealousy and academic dogma.
Tom Brown at Rugby
Thomas Hughes
A spirited boy leaves his rustic home for Rugby School, where he must navigate brutal hazing, fierce athletics, and his own reckless impulses to discover what it truly means to be a man of character.
Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris
Orlo Williams
Youthful enthusiasm, when severed from purpose, decays into disillusionment or dissolves into pure hedonism.
Violets and Other Tales
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
An intricate tapestry of nineteenth-century life, this collection weaves together poignant fiction, reflective prose, and quiet verse to capture the fragile, fleeting moments of human connection.
Actions and reactions
Rudyard Kipling
A wounded American tycoon finds healing in an old English manor, while across the world, airships brave arctic gales and a hive of bees collapses under a strange delusion.
Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River
Joseph Conrad
Driven by dreams of European wealth that rot alongside his decaying river mansion, a Dutch trader in Borneo unravels as his Malay-English daughter chooses her mother’s heritage over his grand ambitions.
Chats on autographs
Alexander Meyrick Broadley
An affection for handwritten history and a shrewd collector's eye transform preserved letters into living encounters with the past.
Darwinism (1889): An exposition of the theory of natural selection, with some of its applications
Alfred Russel Wallace
A seminal co-discoverer of evolution mounts a robust defense of natural selection, demonstrating how life diversifies through survival and adaptation.
Delight and power in speech : A universal dramatic reader
George Wharton James
Clear human speech is an essential, universal art that transforms spoken words into genuine emotional connection, personal mastery, and lasting civic power.
Early Days in North Queensland
Edward Palmer
Across dry mud plains, rocky ranges, and dense thickets of peabush, early pastoralists pushed into the vast, uncharted interior of tropical Australia to carve out a sprawling cattle empire from the raw wilderness.
Elementary Theosophy
L. W. (Louis William) Rogers
Amid world-shattering war and religious doubt, a rational framework promises to reconcile scientific evolution with immortal spirit, mapping human destiny across subtle planes and repeated lives.
Ireland under the Tudors, with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. Vol. 1 (of 3)
Richard Bagwell
Centuries of misaligned law, divided authority, and violent conquest leave Ireland fractured long before the Tudor monarchs attempt to pull it under total crown control.
Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?
Isaac Allen
A rigorous textual dismantling of the pro-slavery biblical argument reveals how scripture, properly translated and contextualized, systematically rejects chattelism in favor of human dignity and universal liberty.
Perfumes and their preparation : Containing complete directions for making handkerchief perfumes, smelling-salts, sachets, fumigating pastils
George William Askinson
Crafting commercial scents requires moving past guesswork to ground the art of perfumery in rigorous chemistry and systematic physical extraction.
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 6
United States. Work Projects Administration
A remarkably immediate set of voices emerges from these interview pages, recording the memories of elderly Black Americans who lived through the final days of slavery, the Civil War, and the long decades that followed. Recorded in the late 1930s in Arkansas, these testimonies capture lives shaped by forced labor,…
Spinning-Wheel Stories
Louisa May Alcott
A snowbound family gathers around a whirring spinning wheel during winter vacation to hear fireside tales of brave children, historic struggles, and quiet everyday triumphs.
The Arte of English Poesie
George Puttenham
A detailed guide to craft and courtly decorum, this Tudor handbook shapes the vernacular tongue into an instrument of royal service, persuasive rhetoric, and geometric artistry.
The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, 1396-1427
Johannes Schiltberger
Captured as a youth on a medieval battlefield, a Bavarian soldier endures thirty years of captivity, wandering as a servant across the vast domains of Turkish sultans, Tatar warlords, and Egyptian monarchs.
The Cathedral Builders: The Story of a Great Masonic Guild
Leader Scott
A continuous lineage of master masons spans the centuries between Rome’s fall and the Italian Renaissance.
The Chignecto Isthmus and Its First Settlers
Howard Trueman
A narrow, marshy strip of land links New Brunswick to Nova Scotia, holding the quiet history of a continent's reshaping. Howard Trueman gathers the paper trails and oral memories of this borderland, creating a meticulous, affectionate portrait of its first British and Yorkshire settlers.
The Crystal Crypt
Philip K. Dick
A passenger ship flees Mars on the eve of war, carrying three covert operatives who have stolen an entire alien city and shrunk it into a glass paperweight.
The Guardian Angel
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Bound by the dark shadow of her lineage, a spirited young woman must escape the spiritual and emotional traps set by local schemers to secure her own sanity and freedom.
The History of Lumsden's Horse: A Complete Record of the Corps from Its Formation to Its Disbandment
Unknown
They volunteered from the tea and indigo plantations of British India, trading a quiet life of sport and commerce for the dust, rain, and cold of the South African veldt.
The Patient Observer and His Friends
Simeon Strunsky
Comfortably at home in the bustling chatter of early twentieth-century New York, an understated urban guide offers a wry, genial tour through the quiet absurdities of everyday life.
The Stark Munro Letters: Being series of twelve letters written by J. Stark Munro, M.B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the years 1881-1884
Arthur Conan Doyle
A young British physician struggles through poverty, professional betrayal, and profound crisis of faith while attempting to establish his independent medical practice.
The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay: With an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island (1789)
Arthur Phillip
Setting sail across uncharted oceans to plant a colony at the edge of the known world, an eighteenth-century naval expedition transforms raw untamed wilderness into the precarious beginnings of a new society.
Travels in Alaska
John Muir
In the vast, silent wilderness of the far North, ice moves like a living thing, carving canyons, shaping fjords, and revealing the fundamental forces that forged the Earth.
Two Years in the French West Indies
Lafcadio Hearn
A lush, spellbound immersion in a tropical paradise turns imperceptibly into a long, bittersweet wrestling match with its dangers, loss, and haunting charm.
Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record
Percy Greg
Driven across space by a novel anti-gravitational force, a Victorian traveler reaches Mars, only to find a hyper-rational, cold paradise where secret spiritualists wage a quiet war for the human soul.
Aërial Navigation: A Popular Treatise on the Growth of Air Craft and on Aëronautical Meteorology
Albert Francis Zahm
From the quiet drift of early hot-air balloons to the high-stakes speed trials of early monoplanes, humanity’s relentless push into the atmosphere reshaped the boundaries of distance, transportation, and military strategy.
Alfred Tennyson
Andrew Lang
A giant's strength and a child's susceptibility collide in the life of a poet who carved immortal music out of personal sorrow and public indifference.
Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air
Joseph Priestley
Air is not a simple, static element, but a complex family of distinct fluids waiting to be isolated, measured, and understood.
Fragments of Earth Lore: Sketches & Addresses Geological and Geographical
James Geikie
The jagged contours of our modern landscapes hide an ancient, violent history written by moving ice, shifting crusts, and the relentless scouring of prehistoric streams.
History of Friedrich II of Prussia
Thomas Carlyle
A ruler's duty is to build, defend, and govern with relentless force, standing firm against the looming chaos of European collapse.
Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery
George Iles
Mechanics, physics, and natural history converge to demonstrate that human ingenuity advances not by sudden, magical leaps, but through the deliberate, systematic observation and transformation of natural laws.
Junior High School Literature, Book 1
William H. (William Harris) Elson
Literature expands human experience, forging an unbroken bond between historical sacrifice, high adventure, and the quiet dignity of daily life.
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
A towering figure of Victorian science confronts declining health while defending empirical truth, debating theologians, and tending Alpine gentians in his final years.
Memoirs of the Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp: Late a Lieut. in His Majesty's 87th Regiment
John Shipp
A parish orphan enlists as a boy soldier, fights his way through siege breaches and mountain passes, and earns a commission twice over in the British army.
Mistress and Maid: A Household Story
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
A quiet, deeply human Victorian story, Mistress and Maid examines class, loyalty, and personal endurance through the interwoven lives of three impoverished gentgewomen and their sturdy young servant.
Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet: An Autobiography
John Sherman
From a bright childhood on the banks of Ohio's rivers to the inner sanctums of Gilded Age power, this memoir traces forty years of defining national struggle through the eyes of a master legislative craftsman.
Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries: Their Age and Uses
James Fergusson
Across windswept downs, quiet valleys, and coastal scrub, thousands of massive stone rings and earthworks stand in plain sight, baffling generations of antiquaries who preferred myth and Druidical fantasy to painstaking fieldwork.
Sea-Weeds, Shells and Fossils
Peter Gray
An accessible, practical handbook designed to turn curious seaside walkers into methodical naturalists through clear taxonomy and DIY collecting guides.
The art of music, Vol. 02 (of 14)
Unknown
Through decades of theatrical artifice, technical experimentation, and shifting public taste, European music underwent a fundamental transformation as it moved from formal classicism into the emotional intensity of the romantic age.
The Cambridge natural history, Vol. 06 (of 10)
David Sharp
From the meticulous architectural engineering of solitary bees to the deafening songs of South American cicadas, a quiet world of extraordinary, mechanical marvels unfolds beneath our feet.
The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California: To which is Added a Description of the Physical Geography of California, with Recent Notices of the Gold Region from the Latest and Most Authentic Sources
John Charles Frémont
A wilderness reveals its sharpest edges not through grand mythologies, but in the exact weight of a pack-mule, the violent suddenness of a buffalo hunt, and the cold reality of mountain snow.