Thank you, kiana, that's very helpful indeed. I have a geometry-lover, so that may possibly work well for us here. I think at least I'll order a copy and have a good look at it. I must say I do like the prose--it reads very well.

Bump?

We've enjoyed the books mentioned in this thread: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/513619-favourite-treeforest-books/?hl=%2Btrees&do=findComment&comment=5754293 ETA a couple more favourites: Colin Tudge's Secret Life of Trees, and Peter Thomas's Trees: Their Natural History. Also seconding McPhee!

I see after searching that Kathy likes his linear algebra book (Linear Algebra Done Right); I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with some of the other books? (specifically Algebra & Trigonometry; College Algebra; Precalculus: A Prelude to Calculus) They look interesting to me, and I like the writing style of the samples. Some samples here: http://www.axler.net/ Thanks for your help!

Lucian's a hoot! But yes, you might want to preview a bit first. ETA: This is a good edition: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-00443-4/

Sorry, Donna, I don't know; I just bookmarked it when someone here (katilac?) mentioned it once, as she made it sound quite interesting. I expect it's probably one of those first-year university survey course type textbooks.

Adding: we get some French books from Book Depository (free shipping), some from amazon.fr or amazon.ca, some from chapters.ca, and some from archambault.ca .

Just dropping in to say that we last year took up Nan's suggestion of doing a couple of subjects in French (history/art history/geography and literature/grammar) using French textbooks (though we use Magnard instead of Hachette because they were easier to get here), and it has been brilliant. (Nan is brilliant.) The kids' comfort and facility in French have grown exponentially since we started doing that. We also used dictation books that some other nice person here whose name I no longer remember (started with a J, I think) suggested (La librairie des écoles: La bonne méthode de dictée), which was also very useful for the couple of years we did that. Also useful were the CLE international books Grammaire progressive du français pour les adolescents.

Have you seen Four Greek Plays, edited by Kenneth McLeish and published by Bristol Classical Press? They're "cleaned-up" versions of two tragedies and two comedies used in the UK schools (for GCSE in Classical Civilisation--so older kids than your son)--maybe worth a look? Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Four-Greek-Plays-Kenneth-McLeish/dp/1853995835

Was it Gloria Fiero's The Humanistic Tradition? Maybe? (Haven't used it, but it's nestled in my bookmarks...)

Also huge, but lots of languages--University of Toronto. University of Oklahoma seems to have some less common languages as well. ETA Turkish studies in the US: http://www.turkishstudies.org/turkish_in_the_us/studies.shtml EATA Wikipedia says Persian studies at Harvard, Ohio State, San Francisco State, UTX at Austin, U of MD

If you can get the American company to ship USPS, then there shouldn't be any extra brokerage fees. You can get hit with a big(gish) bill for brokerage if it's delivered via UPS or FedEx. Rainbow ships USPS and I use them for most curriculum-ish things (we use lots of trade books here, too, which I mostly get from Book Depository). The service is good from Rainbow, albeit slow (I agree that 3 weeks is about par for the course for orders from the US). Oddly, shipping from the UK is hugely faster; I have often had things in 48 hours! I have ordered a few things from Canadian homeschool suppliers (Smarts, CHER, Blue Mantle), but when the dollar was near par, it was just so much more expensive to order from Canadian suppliers. Now that it has gotten so much lower, it might be worth looking at Canadian sites again. Of course, their costs for importing their stock just went way up, too, so it may be a bit of a wash in the end.

Well, I think it would make a good place to start, certainly; she likes big questions, I believe? (This is the daughter who did the huge study of Northern epics, isn't it?) A couple other ideas occur to me: Richard was "tried" a couple of times in I think the 1990s, once in the US and once in the UK, as I recall; so questions of what constitutes specifically legal evidence, as opposed to the judgment of history, might also be interesting to consider. A more philosophical question might be why do we still care? Does it really matter whether or not he was guilty at this distance in time? (I think it does matter, for various reasons to do with the value we place on truth and what it means to be living in a humane society, but it's a good sort of question for a teen to grapple with, I think. It's the sort of question that arises even now; in Canada in recent years, our government has apologized for the treatment of Japanese-Canadians during the war, apologized for the Chinese head tax, apologized for the residential school system imposed on First Nations children, and various other issues--these are important things to have done; truth matters, justice matters.) She sounds like such an interesting student; you must have a lot of fun working together.

You always do such interesting things! Has she read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time? Not very scholarly, but an interesting take on the story. We did this for a teen book club and the whole group really enjoyed it. It's a detective novel, whose hook is the fact that the detective (a police inspector) is bedridden with a bad injury and decides to combat boredom with an intellectual investigation. More or less by accident, he winds up looking into the story of the two princes, after having been dismayed that on first glance at Richard's portrait he had mentally placed him on the bench, rather than in the dock. The kids and I took the opportunity to talk about profiling of various sorts (I gave them all photos of a bunch of Watergate characters and had them try to guess "good" guy or "bad" guy as an exercise--that generated tons of discussion!). There's also Philippa Langley's quite recent book about the discovery of Richard's remains (the reburial in Leicester is quite soon--in March, I think?). The identification of the remains relied on genetic evidence; that could be an area to investigate. I don't know if she's interested in military history, but for those who are, the Battle of Bosworth is an intriguing example of medieval warfare and strategy. There are some titles here that might be interesting:http://www.richardiii.net/downloads/2014_10_31_catalogue.pdf There are so many questions one could ponder, particularly about historiography: what kinds of things constitute good evidence in doing history? ETA one more thing: do you know the fiction genre of "alternative history"? For example, the writer imagines that the Nazis won WW2, and then writes a story based in that alternate reality. I've always thought Bosworth would make an excellent such turning point for an alternate reality--what if there had been no Tudors? What does the world look like after that?

This book might be interesting: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9834.html

This is happening to me, too. I can start new threads, but I can't send private messages or reply to posts on already existing threads. It's irksome. ETA: Except this one, it seems! How odd.

I thought these books looked like fun: http://www.rsc.org/Shop/books/ChemistryandArt.asp

I found an old bookmark I thought I'd add here. http://www.dcassidybooks.com/up.html is a free online conceptual physics book. I believe it was Dawn who mentioned it on this forum at one point; I think her daughter liked it quite well, as I recall. (One can also buy it in hard copy.) ETA: Hey!! I can link again! I haven't been able to do that for ages!!

That's fantastic, Brandy!

Oh, I'm pleased, quark! It's a fun book. Davis also wrote one called Thomas Grey, Philosopher Cat that was enjoyable, too (though I like The Thread better).

Well, in a way it's like The Phantom Tollbooth, I guess--it's got a similarly lighthearted, playful quality. What it's really like is a lecture by that favourite eccentric professor we all had somewhere along the way--the one who would get sidetracked by a stray thought, and one digression would lead to the next, and then another, and another...and somehow everything all seemed wonderfully connected by the end of the story, and we all had a lot of new things to ponder. I'm sure he'll love the books you picked; they sound great!

Do you think he'd like Philip Davis's The Thread?

Another thought: Science Jim's Bitesize Physics? (I edited to add Horrible Science Physics above, but not sure if you saw it, so I'll repeat myself here!) Hope you find something you like! (I'm editing again, oh dear--I know you're looking for a text, not comics! But have you seen the Max Axiom series?)

What about Yakov Perelman's Physics for Entertainment (2 vols.)? Those are really fun and also quite substantial. Maybe too easy, but the Horrible Science physics titles are actually very good.

Coaching?