Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

1Stories From The Operas

By Gladys Davidson

"Owing to the appreciation which has been accorded to my three series of "Stories from the Operas," it has been decided to re-issue the collection in one volume, and to include in this additional stories of new and popular operas recently produced in England.<br /><br />The plan of the work, as before, is to present all the incidents of each libretto in the clear, readable form of a short story; and it is hoped that the combined volume will continue to prove of interest, not only to opera-goers but to all lovers of dramatic tales. The three volumes have been entirely reset and re-collated in a manner which it is hoped will make them easier for reference." - Summary by Gladys Davidson

2Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906

By Max Baginski, John Russell Coryell, John Davidson, Emma Goldman, Mary Hansen, Otto Erich Hartleben and I. L. Peretz

"Mother Earth was an American anarchist journal that described itself as "A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature". Founded in early 1906 and initially edited by Emma Goldman, an activist in the United States, it published articles by contemporary activists and writers in Europe as well as the US, in addition to essays by historic figures." This is Volume 1 of the series. This is the second number of the magazine.

The oft-maligned Testaments of John Davidson work as a sublime, psychopathic post-Nietzchean (Zarathustra was merely Davidson's springboard into a deeper transcendence) prologue to his impending suicide in 1909. After a warmly receptive life of ballad making and the like (benevolent pedagogy and inclusion in the chintzy Rhymer's Club), a by then poverty-stricken, neglected Davidson could sharpen his mind toward the completion of a more pristine art. Subsequently, we are given the meanest gap between symbolism and modernism (an expressionistic, Schopenhauerian materialist monism in monologic profile a la Browning, a demented Kipling) on record, a Marlowe-level blank verse masterwork of the now, warping into a demented, ironically (intended or not, certainly unfunded and ignored by anyone in charge) nationalist individualism, a system of self-deification, the final scream of a decaying genius. (Summary by kilpatrick83)

4Winter of Content

By Laura Lee Davidson

A charming memoir recounting 10 months spent among the country people of Ontario at the outbreak of the Great War. Resplendent in its descriptions and heartwarming in its depictions of the 'simple' folk living along Many Islands Lake. - Summary by KevinS

In my Volume on Aristotle in this series, I tried to give an account of ancient, classical, and social Education; in the present volume I have endeavored to set forth the nature of modern, romantic, and unsocial Education. This education originates with Rousseau. With much reluctance I have been obliged to dwell, at considerable length, on the facts of his life, in order to show that his glittering structure rests, not upon any broad and firm foundation of well-generalized and well-sifted experience, but upon the private tastes and preferences of an exceptionally capricious and self-centered nature. His Emile is simply his selfish and unsocial self, forcibly withheld, by an external Providence, in the shape of an impossible tutor, from those aberrations which led that self into the a "dark forest " of misery. If my estimate of Rousseau's value as an educator proves disappointing to those who believe in his doctrines, I can only say, in excuse, that I am more disappointed than they are. (From author's Preface)

A charming and thoughtful view of life in Canada experienced while vacationing on a small island in summer. The author is a women who is independent, observant, and compassionate in her view of her 'simple' neighbors. Ms. Davidson's description of the natural world, also, in this idyllic setting and time is well worth the time of one's listening and contemplation. - Summary by KevinS

7Blowing Away of Mr. Bushy Tail

By Edith B. Davidson

A tale of the adventures and misadventures of Mr. Bushy Tale on his quest to find food for his family to last the winter. - Summary by Natalie Fortier